I did not know, sitting at that dinner, how completely I was about to need it.

Wendy thought she was cornering a helpless girl.

What she had actually done was corner a girl who had spent six weeks rigging the room to collapse on whoever cornered her.

She just could not see it, because she had never once, in all the years she ignored me, bothered to ask what the quiet accountant in the corner was doing with all that time and all those numbers.

I have wondered whether Wendy ever thought about me at all, in the years before that dinner, and I have concluded that she almost certainly did not, and that this was the deepest source of her defeat.