A less capable auditor would never have found the fraud, would never have threatened her, would have lived a quiet and unpunished life.

My gift was my curse.

And now, half a decade later, in a stranger’s house, the same gift did the opposite work: I looked at a forged paternity report the way I had once looked at a forged audit trail, and I saw, instantly, the tells — the mismatched codes, the missing watermark, the whole hurried architecture of a lie.

The thing that had ruined me was the thing that redeemed me.

I have thought since that this is often how it goes, that our great strengths and our great vulnerabilities are frequently the same trait seen from two sides — that the very quality which makes a person a target is often the quality that eventually saves them, if they can only survive long enough for the wheel to turn.

My eye for a forgery cost me five years.