Wendy had married an investigator and spent six years mistaking him for a pushover, and she had chosen, of everyone in the world to defraud, the one person in her life who did this for a living.

I have thought a great deal, since, about the specific psychology that made her so sure of me, because it is the same psychology that lets so many predators operate for so long undetected, and it is worth naming.

Wendy did not misjudge me by accident.

She misjudged me according to a very old and very confident set of assumptions about what strength looks like — assumptions that equate volume with power, and aggression with competence, and quiet with weakness.

In her world, the strong man was the loud one, the one who dominated a dinner table, who raised his voice and got his way, who made a scene and won it.

And by that measure I was nothing: I did not dominate, I did not raise my voice, I hated scenes and avoided them, I would rather concede a small argument than have a loud one.