And now the woman he had priced at three thousand dollars a month, the meek assistant he had condescended to, was sitting at the head of his own boardroom holding the note on his company, and the two facts could not coexist inside his head.

If I was who Ijeoma said I was, then the surface had lied to him — which meant the surface could lie, which meant every judgment he had ever made about a person’s value by looking at them was suspect, which meant he did not actually know how to see people at all.

He was not just watching his marriage and his company collapse.

He was watching the collapse of the only method he had ever used to understand the world.

I almost felt for him.

It is a terrible thing to learn, at the worst possible moment and in front of your mother, that you have been illiterate in the one language you were most sure you could read.