He underestimated me because of the role I was temporarily occupying.

For a few months, I was a woman on maternity leave, tired, at home, in soft clothes, smelling of milk and baby powder, my days consumed by feedings and naps.

And in Julian’s mind, and in the minds of far too many people, that role simply erased everything else I was.

The competent professional, the sharp analyst, the woman who could dismantle a fraud, all of it became invisible the moment I put on the costume of the new mother, as though a woman caring for an infant could not also be, still, all the formidable things she had been the month before.

It is a strange and revealing form of contempt, this assumption that a woman is only ever the single role you currently see her in, that the exhausted mother cannot also be the ruthless auditor, that the person changing diapers has somehow surrendered the mind that made her excellent at her work.