Brandon told me, one evening, that we would have to delay repairing a leaking section of the roof, because a major client had paid late and the cash flow was tight that quarter.

And that very same week, taking a suit jacket of his to the cleaners as he’d asked, I found a receipt in the inside pocket: a dinner for two, at a luxury hotel, for three hundred and eighty-six dollars.

A lesser version of me — or an untrained one — might have confronted him, wept, and been talked back into doubting herself by breakfast.

But numbers had been my career, and the analyst in me, dormant for years, woke up.

I did not fixate on the single receipt.

I did what my old profession had taught me, which is never to mistake one data point for a pattern, and never mistake the absence of a pattern for innocence.