Confession received through the anonymous form. Four video files were attached; we did not open them.
Between January 9th and September 2nd, three thousand five hundred yuan went missing from the second drawer of the hallway console. That is where we keep the household cash, in a red lacquer box, for the delivery men, the dry cleaner's, the woman who does the windows, the guard at Spring Festival. Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred at a time, never more, never off the top of the pile. I started counting on March 3rd. I counted thirty-four times in six months, always between ten at night and midnight, in a spiral notebook, date column, balance column, difference column.
On August 18th, I bought a camera for a hundred and twenty-nine yuan, motion detection, thirty-two gig card, and I set it on the living room shelf behind a photo frame, two meters forty from the console, the lens in the gap between the frame and a vase. Our housekeeper had been living with us for three years and seven months. Six thousand eight hundred yuan a month, a room of four and a half square meters next to the kitchen, Sundays free, nine days' leave a year to go home to Anhui. She is the one I was filming and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
On September 2nd at four fifty-two in the afternoon, my daughter came home from middle school, put down her bag, opened the second drawer, lifted the lid of the lacquer box, took three hundred-yuan notes and put them in the inside pocket of her jacket. She is thirteen. She closed the box holding it in both hands so it wouldn't snap, which means she had done it before.