I want to explain how a man like Mason talks himself into a confession, because it is the same mechanism, exactly, that had let the whole fraud grow in the first place, and understanding it is understanding everything.

Mason was not stupid.

He was a chief financial officer; he knew, in the abstract, that you do not narrate your crimes aloud.

But he had a deeper conviction that overrode all of that, and the conviction was this: that I did not count.

In his mind I was not a witness, because a witness is a person, and I was not quite a person to him — I was a category, a soon-to-be-ex-wife, a defeated and frightened woman with no resources and no future, furniture being moved out of a house.

You do not guard your words in front of furniture.