I checked the claims against the underlying documents.

I assumed, always, that anyone presenting me with a flattering picture had a reason to present it that way, and I found the reason.

And I did all of this not out of cynicism but out of care — because my job was to protect people from being ruined by a rot they could not see.

Then I went home to the man I was going to marry, and I switched all of it off, and I called the switching-off love.

I told myself that to look closely at Logan, to notice the pattern of Chloe’s crises, to add up who was actually paying for what, would be a betrayal of my trust in him.

But it would not have been.

Looking clearly at someone is not the opposite of loving them; it is what makes love safe to give.

The people who deserve your trust are not harmed by your attention — they have nothing hidden in the footnotes.

It is only the ones who are bankrupting you who need you to believe that reading the fine print is the same thing as not loving them.

Logan needed me not to audit him.

That need, I understand now, was itself the finding.

A man who cannot survive being looked at closely is telling you exactly what the analysis would show.

Chapter 2 — The Sterling Family

We were both from Manhattan, but from different Manhattans.