I pretended to sleep in my own bed on Thursday because $340 was missing from the coffee can in my closet, and my husband swore his mother had taken it.

“Mama’s had sticky fingers her whole life,” Dwayne said.

I told them both I’d worked a double and would sleep until supper. Then I lay down in my work shirt, shut the blinds, pulled the quilt up, and waited.

Judy Cole is sixty-eight and five foot nothing. She has a key to our house because she comes every Thursday to do Dwayne’s work shirts. For nine years, I’d been afraid of saying the wrong thing to her. She didn’t hug me at my wedding. At the family Christmas party she called me “Dwayne’s wife,” as if I came with the truck.

I’d been putting money aside for my daughter’s braces in that can. Every payday I added a hundred dollars and wrote it on a strip of masking tape inside the lid. For eleven weeks, the amount and the tape hadn’t matched. Some Fridays the can was short. Some weeks there was more in it than I had put there.

I kept counting. At work, I’m a shift lead at the Walmart in Hazard, and my drawer balances to the penny every night. At home, I’d count the coffee-can money and then count it again.

“I think something’s wrong with the can,” I told Dwayne.

He went quiet. I wanted him to tell me I’d miscounted. Instead, he said, “Mama took from my granddaddy’s store when she was a girl. Everybody knows.”

“So you think it’s her?”

“She’s old. She’s my mama. Don’t make a fuss.”

I loved him for protecting her. That’s the part I was ashamed to admit later. I thought he was defending a woman I couldn’t bring myself to challenge, and I let his explanation settle over the matter.

But the money was for our daughter. I cried in the truck at the Marathon station because I didn’t know how to protect her teeth from his mother.

At two o’clock Wednesday morning, I finally told myself what I had been avoiding: if I was wrong, women all over Perry County would hear I’d accused Judy Cole in her own son’s house. I decided to find out anyway.

Wednesday night I called Judy.

“Don’t mind me tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be dead asleep.”

“You sure?” she asked.

“I worked a double. I’ll sleep till supper.”

“All right, honey.”

The next afternoon, I lay down and kept my breathing slow and heavy. I have had grown men scream at me over a return at the service desk. I know how to keep my face still when I need to.

At 3:20, the closet door creaked.

When I cracked one eye, Judy was standing over my bed with my coffee can. She was looking right at me.

“Danielle?” she whispered. “You awake, honey?”

I didn’t move. She waited a long time, then turned toward the closet with the can against her chest. I heard the lid come off.

“Sixty short,” she whispered. “Lord help me.”

There was a rustle of paper. Then the lid snapped back on. She set the can on the shelf slowly, so it wouldn’t clank.

On her way out, she stopped at the foot of the bed. I thought she was going to say something. Instead, she pulled the quilt over my feet, which had worked their way out, and tiptoed away.