And that, he understood, watching a baby drink formula he had bought in a pharmacy aisle, was precisely how fortunes like his stayed clean in the minds of the people who held them: by making sure the small numbers and the large ones were never allowed to touch.

His family lived among the large numbers — the valuations, the acquisitions, the reputation his father had spent forty years building.

Those were the numbers that got discussed at dinner, that defined success, that felt real.

The small numbers — a widow’s wage, a delayed equipment order, twenty-eight dollars for formula — belonged to a different and lower world, handled by other, lesser-seen people, and the entire architecture of a life like Corbin’s was arranged, effectively, to keep the two worlds from ever meeting in a single mind.

He had never followed the twenty-eight dollars down to the buried death because the whole system was built so that no one ever would; the small human number and the large human cost were kept in separate ledgers, tended by separate departments, and the man at the top was permitted, even encouraged, to see only the summary.