For six years, without any grand plan, out of nothing more than the temperament of a woman who cannot leave a number unreconciled, I had preserved the true account of his business — every transfer, every signature, every shortcut — while he laughed at me for bothering.

We were, the two of us, engaged in the same activity from opposite moral poles.

He falsified the record to hide the truth.

I preserved the record to keep it.

And when it all finally came into the light, his falsified records collapsed under the weight of my preserved ones, because a lie written on paper can always be undone by the truth written on paper, if someone had the discipline to write the truth down and keep it.

That is the thing men like Julian never learn until it destroys them: that the person keeping the receipts is not small, and is not beneath them, and is, in the end, the only person in the room holding anything that will still be true tomorrow.