It was the whole lesson of my life, compressed into a single line of policy.

Everything that had happened to me — the fraud, the marriage, all of it — had grown in the one place fraud always grows: the place where someone is trusted too much to be checked.

Gavin’s accountants had not checked him because he was the boss.

Crestview had nearly handed him three billion dollars because the numbers looked good and the man looked confident and no one had insisted on turning over the last stone.

And I had let a husband raise a belt to me in part because I had spent six years asking no hard questions of my own marriage, trusting the surface, declining to audit the man I lived with the way I audited strangers for a living.