It is that they cannot conceive of danger wearing a cardigan and a patient expression, and so they never see me coming until I am already there.

Adrian had lived with me for eight years and had never once, in all that time, looked at what I did all day.

He knew I was a CFO the way you know a fact about a stranger.

He did not understand, in his bones, that he had married a person whose entire profession was the reconstruction of hidden truths from paper trails, and that he had spent a year building his hidden truth on paper, in my company, under my nose.

He toasted my barrenness, and set it down, and I collected the glass, and he did not even see me do it.

That is the whole of my method, and it has never once failed me: let them believe you are harmless, and they will hand you everything.