It was the thing I was best at in the world, better than I was at being anyone’s quiet wife.

Gavin knew I had a job.

He thought it was small.

He pictured me reviewing dull little spreadsheets for dull little businesses, and he never asked a second question, because a second question might have revealed something about me that was larger than him, and Gavin did not collect information that made other people larger than him.

For six years I sat across the dinner table from a man building a nine-billion-dollar company on falsified numbers, and he never once suspected that the plain wife passing him the salt spent her days doing the exact kind of audit that could bring a company like his to the ground.

He mocked my “little job” at parties.