And all the while, the overlooked one in the corner is watching, and remembering, and understanding — accumulating, in silence, a complete and detailed picture of exactly how the powerful person operates, precisely because the powerful person is too arrogant to consider her worth hiding from.

Wendy ignored me for years.

She thought she was dismissing me.

She was, in fact, granting me the single greatest advantage one person can have over another, which is to be underestimated by them completely.

I did not resent, in the end, being called the little accountant.

I understood it for what it was: my stepmother, in her contempt, describing the exact blind spot through which I was going to destroy her.

She had spent years teaching me that I was too small to matter.