I am an auditor by profession, and an audit is simply this: you stop accepting what you are told, and you go and check the underlying facts for yourself.

So for the third dinner, I ran an audit on my own life.

Before we left our apartment, I took a photograph of myself, fully and correctly dressed.

I made a tiny, precise ink mark on my wrist, hidden under my watch band, in a spot I would notice if my arm were moved.

And I made sure my phone’s photos synced automatically to the family’s shared cloud album, so that anything captured would exist somewhere outside that house, beyond anyone’s reach.

I did not yet know what I was collecting evidence of.