It would have been easy, in that moment, to conclude that he had simply won, that the game was over, that the sensible thing was to go back and be a quiet wife and survive.

What pulled me back from that edge was not courage.

It was the habit of my profession, which is to distrust the number on the screen and ask who entered it and why.

The zero was not a fact about my worth or my future.

It was an entry someone had made, with a forged authorization, for a specific purpose, on a specific date, and anything that can be entered can be challenged, and anything challenged can be undone.

I walked out of that bank with forty-two dollars and the one asset he had not managed to strip, which was my refusal to accept his numbers as the truth.