I was a senior forensic auditor, and my specialty, the thing I did at the highest level for a living, was non-profit tax compliance.

My entire professional life was the tracing of money through charitable structures, the detection of exactly the kinds of fraud that hide inside the respectable architecture of a foundation.

I spent my days finding the anomalies that people far more sophisticated than Julian had spent fortunes trying to conceal.

And the Vances, who mocked my career as paper-pushing, who could not conceive of my work as anything but tedious, had made the single most dangerous mistake it is possible to make: they had committed their crimes in front of a person professionally trained to see them, and they had assumed, because they held me in contempt, that I never would.

Contempt, I have come to understand, is not just an unkindness.