I had spent seven years erasing exactly the visibility that might have protected me.

That was the trap, and I had built it around myself, and it took a broken leg to show me I was in it.

Chapter 3 — Three Point Eight Million

The trouble began, as trouble in a company always does, with numbers that did not reconcile.

I noticed it first as a texture, a wrongness — the particular feeling a person who designed a financial system gets when the system starts telling small lies.

Documents that should have been in my office were not.