For years Gavin had operated on the assumption that his cleverness was invisible — that he could route money to the woman he wanted, dress it as a bonus, bury her apartment inside a vendor relationship, sign off on his own conflicts of interest, and that no one would ever look, because no one had ever looked.

He had run the same play on the company that he had run on me at home: a quiet siphon, hidden inside a structure of plausible ordinary things, protected by the fact that the person being robbed had no reason to audit the robber.

At home, the auditor was supposed to be me, and he had made sure I never learned to read a balance sheet of my own life.

At work, the auditor was a department full of people whose entire job was to read balance sheets — and the only thing that had kept them from reading his was that no one had handed them a reason to start.