Three days after my twin sons were born, my husband brought twenty-two members of his family into a hospital room and offered me two hundred thousand dollars to sign away my marriage, my children, and my right to ever ask about their company's accounts. They expected me to cry. I read every page and signed all of them.

I was flattered for about four months.

Marisol Quade started as controller in the April.

She was twenty-seven and she had two years of experience and she had been recommended, Adelaide said, by a friend.

I want to set down that Marisol Quade was not a woman who stole a husband. That is the story this town wants and it is not the story.

She was hired into a chair I had been moved out of, and she was hired because she would sign what she was given, and the affair started in the October and I now believe it was the second thing, not the first.

I found out about the affair in the June, when I was four months pregnant, from a photograph on a phone left on a kitchen counter.

And I did not say a word.

That is the six months. That is what everybody means when they say I had been preparing.