The reason it took me so long — the reason I ignored the discrepancies in my own life for three years, when I would have flagged the identical discrepancies in a client’s business within an afternoon — is that I had been taught, my whole life, that a woman’s highest skill is the management of other people’s comfort.

I was a brilliant auditor of everyone’s books but my own.

In my work, I never once hesitated to follow a discrepancy to its source, no matter whose comfort it disturbed; that was the job, and I was fearless in it.

But in my marriage, I had absorbed the opposite training entirely: that my role was to smooth things over, to keep the peace, to explain away the thing that did not add up rather than trace it, because tracing it would cause conflict, and causing conflict was the one thing a good wife must never do.

It is a strange and terrible thing to be professionally fearless and personally silenced at the same time — to spend your days insisting that discrepancies be confronted and your evenings insisting to yourself that yours be ignored.