My mother-in-law put her hands on me, then drove me to the emergency room like she was doing me a favor and told the triage nurse I was clumsy. What she did not know is that I spent nine years as a forensic accountant, and that six months earlier I had found the hole in her books — and that the account she had come to my apartment about was one of the places the money sat.

The assault charge would have been about what she did to me. The other thing was about six years, eleven vendors, two point one million dollars and a bookkeeper with two kids.

I picked the one that was bigger than my face.

Dorian cooperated early and comprehensively, which was the right decision and the only one available to him, and he has an arrangement I am not going to detail. He has written to me twice. I have not opened either.

I live in a different county now. I went back to the firm I left when I got married, which took one phone call and about nine minutes, and my old managing partner said the single kindest thing anybody said to me that year, which was: what week can you start.

Not: are you all right. Not: I heard.

What week can you start.

I did eighteen months of Thursdays with a woman in Marchmont. Most of it was not about the kitchen. Most of it was about the three years before the kitchen — the toast at the wedding, and the four hundred small remarks, and the fact that by the end of year two I had stopped telling my own friends things because I had gotten used to being explained.

She asked me once, in about month nine, what I thought would have happened if I had not changed the password.

I said the audit would have finished anyway. I would have found it by June.

And she said: I’m not asking about the audit. I’m asking what would have happened to you.