Because the specific thing I was good at was never really about finance.

It was a way of seeing.

It was the habit of refusing to accept the surface story, of asking where a number came from and where it went, of noticing when a thing that was presented as simple was in fact carefully arranged to look simple.

That habit does not evaporate because you spend some years packing lunches.

It is not a set of facts you forget; it is a shape your mind holds.

It had been sitting inside me the whole time, dormant, waiting, and the day I found that receipt it woke up as sharp as it had ever been, and it turned, for the first time, on my own marriage — and it saw, immediately, everything.