I remember the room tilting. I remember thinking, and I believe I said out loud, he had killed me off to his colleagues.

And then Susan reached for her phone and ordered a forensic audit, and I went out into the corridor and got in the elevator, and I thought about that lie for approximately the length of the elevator ride, and then I never thought about it again.

I want to be honest about why, because I have had a long time to work it out.

It was the only piece of evidence I collected that wasn’t useful to me.

The bank alert was useful. The Emma transfers were useful. The Maui photograph was useful — that one put a judge’s signature on a freeze order. Every single thing I found in those three weeks went into a file and the file went to Gavin O’Brien and the file won.

The Boston lie didn’t go anywhere. It was just a horrible thing that had been said about me in a building I didn’t work in. So I let it sit where it was, and Susan’s audit was about corporate expense fraud, not about a collection jar, and nobody ever mentioned one to me, and I moved to California.