You just got to love life don't you?

I probably shouldn't be posting this here, but there isn't really anyone else I can talk to that's not involved. Today I found out the office manager (none family) at the small, family owned (my family) business has been embezzling money from us. I have been being trained by her to fill in while she is out since she is pregnant. She has been gone a lot with doctors etc. and I was taking care of things today. From a quick look through of our books she has taken a pretty good amount over a number of years. We aren't talking Swiss bank accounts and a home in Tahiti kind of money, but it's a good chunk of change, in the low five digits, and there is likely more that I haven't found yet. When I first started getting suspicious I called her and asked some probing questions in the guise of not being sure how to handle something with our system, nothing that would tell her I knew, but it was enough to make her voice pretty stressed.

I brought the owners into this (two closely related family members of mine) and we checked things out. We were able to find out enough that there is absolutely no doubt that she did these. And we are still trying to figure out how to handle this. We know we are not going to get the law involved, that's for sure. She is pregnant and has no husband or even father of her child to support her. All we would end up doing is hurting the kid. And who knows what the stress of this kind of situation would do to her and the child in her condition, she is already considered an at risk pregnancy. She has also been a friend to the whole family for a long time, which is the worst part. She was almost like family. There is also the practical matter of only her really knowing how to run all the back room part of the business, and If any of y'all have ever worked in a small business you know that there are a billion things you need to know how to do, and all in a different way to fit your company. We could get by without her, I have learned most of the basics and we could reach out to some other people for help, but it would end up being a whole hell of a lot of work. So you can see this isn't easy for us. And since one of my bosses just locked her out of our banking accounts, and she texted him asking why since she got a email notification about it from the bank, she has got to have the thought that we might be catching on to her.

The worst part for me though is that I trusted her, I have even defended her when other members of my family bring up some complaint about her. I have never been a very social person and haven't interacted with very many people, but I thought I could judge people's character better than this. I thought people in general were better than this. How can you laugh and joke around with people you are betraying the whole time? I have Asperger's, and I always thought I had trained myself through very hard work and effort to have most of the skills neurotypical's have. I guess I was just fooling myself, I might as well be that autistic teen in southern Maryland that was abused by two teen girls that he thought, and still thinks, are his friends. I no longer trust my judgment on people, maybe on anything.

Oh, and just to add icing to the cake her mother suddenly died last week. Yeah, great time for all this to come to a head, huh?