He had never done this arithmetic before, and the fact that he had never done it was, he began to see, its own kind of indictment.

Corbin Stanford negotiated numbers all day long — margins, valuations, the difference a fraction of a percentage point made across a nine-figure contract.

He considered himself a serious man about money, rigorous, unsentimental, exact.

And he had never once, in thirty-eight years, run the numbers on the life of a person who worked for him.

He had known Lianna’s wage, in the abstract, as a line in a payroll system; he had approved wages like it a thousand times, as reasonable, as competitive, as within market range.

What he had never done was set that wage beside the actual cost of the actual life it was supposed to sustain, and look at the two figures at the same time, on the same page.