It simply refuses to take the story on faith, and goes to look at the underlying reality for itself, and compares the two, and follows the discrepancy wherever it leads, without regard for whose reputation the discrepancy might damage.

For years I had done that with corporate ledgers, dispassionately, without ever thinking of it as anything but a job.

And what I had never done — what almost none of us are taught to do — was turn that same clear, unsentimental method on my own life, on the story the people closest to me were telling me about my own experience.

We are taught, instead, that love means trust, and that to audit the people we love is a kind of betrayal.