I had been ignoring the discrepancies in my own life because I had been taught, as women so often are taught, that keeping the peace mattered more than balancing the books.

Wendy’s fists were merely the discrepancy that finally became too large to ignore.

And once I stopped ignoring it — once I turned on my own life the exact professional attention I had spent nine years turning on strangers’ crimes — the truth came out the way the truth always comes out for an auditor who refuses to look away.

Completely.

And all at once.

And there is a harder truth folded inside that one, which I have had to face honestly, and which I offer to any woman who might need it.