I was a fixture, a grief-stricken girl processing invoices, a quiet presence she had to be minimally polite to at holidays.

And so she left me completely unsupervised, in the one department where all her crimes were recorded, for years, with full access to the numbers, and she never gave it a second thought.

Her indifference to me was not merely an insult.

It was an open door.

If she had feared me even a little, she would have moved me out of finance, or watched my access logs, or been careful about what passed through the servers I could reach.

She did none of those things, because fearing me would have required first believing I mattered, and she was incapable of believing that.