My silence taught him nothing, and let him keep believing the comfortable, fatal thing he wanted to believe: that I was small now, and safe to step on.

I have thought since about how many women are called weak for exactly the thing that is about to make them formidable, and how convenient that mistake is for the men making it.

Chapter 4 — What I Did for a Living

I had spent eight years investigating fraud.

That was my whole career, the one the video call had just ended — tracing hidden assets, reading vendor contracts the way other people read novels, sitting with spreadsheets until the wrong thing surfaced, the tiny inconsistency that arrogant men always assume no one will ever be patient enough to notice.

I was very good at it.