I take the situation a powerful person has arranged specifically so that it cannot be understood — the hidden accounts, the falsified story, the confident lie told over the top of a quiet, frightened woman — and I do the patient, unglamorous work of making it add up, until the truth stands revealed in a form that no amount of money or social standing can argue away.

Wendy and Luca Sterling backed me against a marble counter and believed, as such people always believe, that intimidation would buy them my silence — that being a wife meant enduring cruelty quietly, keeping up appearances, accepting a lesser place in my own home.

They had simply forgotten the one rule I have never once broken in my professional life, and will never break again in my personal one: an auditor never ignores a discrepancy.

She documents it.