Don’t overthink it.”
Pure bureaucracy.
Those two words went through me like a blade, because I had heard them before, in that exact tone, in my own kitchen two years earlier.
That was the phrase Damian had used when he tried to talk me into putting my father’s house into both our names — it’s pure bureaucracy, babe, just cleaner for taxes. I was a senior corporate accountant; reading the true shape of a transaction underneath the words a man uses to describe it was, quite literally, my profession.
I had looked at what he was proposing and seen that the tax logic didn’t hold, that the structure did something very different from what he was saying it did, and I had told him no.
Flatly.
And he had smiled and said no problem and dropped it, and I had believed the matter closed.
It had not been closed.
He had simply removed me from the equation and gone straight to the source.
Under that table, listening to him feed my sharp, careful father the identical line he had once fed me, I understood that the smile and the dropped subject two years ago had not been surrender.
It had been him deciding to route around the obstacle.
The obstacle was me.
And I understood something else, crouched there, that took me longer to fully absorb: that my whole profession, the thing Damian openly sneered at, the spreadsheets and the tax logic and the boring numbers — that had been the one real defense my family had, and he had spent two years quietly working out how to get around it.
He hadn’t married an accountant by accident and then been annoyed to discover she read the fine print.