I understood that particular humiliation—the professional undone in the personal. I had spent fifteen years finding what people hid in balance sheets, and I had not seen what was hiding in my own life. We were, in that specific way, the same. I didn’t say this. But I think she felt it. The air between us shifted, fractionally, toward something workable.
We talked for two hours and fourteen minutes. What I had come in expecting to be an interrogation became something closer to a debrief, with two people comparing notes on the same subject, finding the gaps where their information didn’t overlap. She knew things I didn’t. I knew things she didn’t. Neither of us knew everything. Yet.