When the family treated my money as communal and my time as theirs to assign, I told myself they meant well, not that they saw me as staff.

I was, in the language of my own profession, refusing to book the losses — carrying bad debt on the books of my marriage year after year, marking it at full value, because writing it down to what it was actually worth would have forced me to admit how much I had lost.

Finding Jason at my laptop was the first time I let myself believe what I was seeing, without softening it, without the generous reading.

He had shown me, plainly, that he considered my accounts his business.

So I believed him.

And believing a person when they show you who they are, it turns out, is not cynicism at all.