“I knew it,” Dale kept saying. “I knew it, I knew it.” He was already pacing. Already pulling up the agency’s number on his phone. By the next morning Maria was fired over the phone, and by that afternoon my brother had walked into the police station and filed a report.

Theft from an elderly person. He said it like he was proud of himself. Said somebody had to protect Nana.

And I let him. I want that on the record. I sat in my car in that parking lot and I let my brother do it, because the video looked like exactly what he said it was.

Here’s where I have to tell you the part that I can’t undo.

That Sunday after, I couldn’t sleep. Something was nagging at me and I didn’t even know what. I’d seen the thirty seconds. But I’d never seen the rest. The camera recorded the whole day, hours of it, and Dale had only ever shown me that one little clip. So I drove over while he was at church, sat down with that laptop, and I watched the full thing from Day 4. The whole recording. I don’t even know what I was looking for. I think part of me just needed to see her face again.

Maria took the money at 9:40 in the morning. I watched it again. Same thing. Counted it, pocketed it, left the room.

But then I kept watching.

About twenty minutes later, the front door camera catches her getting in her car. That old gray Corolla with the bumper held on by tape. And she’s gone for nearly an hour. When she comes back, she’s carrying three white paper bags. Pharmacy bags. The kind from Walgreens with the stapled receipt on the front. She sets them on the kitchen counter, and then I watched her do something that I still can’t get out of my head.

She lined Nana’s pills up on the counter, one by one, and she talked to Nana the whole time. I couldn’t hear it good, but I could read her lips on one part. “She’s due for the insulin Thursday.”

I sat there for a long time. Then I got up and I went and dug through Nana’s mail. The pharmacy paperwork. And that’s when my hands started shaking.

I called Walgreens first thing Monday. Told them I was Ruth’s granddaughter and I helped manage her medicine, which is true, even if I’d been doing a sorry job of it. And the pharmacy tech pulled up the records and read them off to me. Nana’s prescriptions. Her blood pressure pills. Her heart medicine. Her insulin.

The family hadn’t paid for a single refill in four months.

Maria had. All of them. Every single one. On her own debit card.