It was the central lie of my whole marriage, the foundation everything else was built on, and I had half-believed it, the way you come to half-believe anything you are told daily by someone you once trusted.

And the deepest satisfaction of building that firm was not that it hurt Roman, because it did not particularly hurt Roman, who by then was far away and irrelevant.

The deep satisfaction was that it disproved the lie, permanently, in the most concrete way there is: with a business, employees, contracts, with a competence so evident that the state itself hired me to audit on behalf of the vulnerable.

Every case my firm takes is a piece of evidence, entered into the record of my own life, against the thing Roman spent a decade trying to make me believe.