That realization did not heal anything by itself. It simply gave me a direction. I began seeing a counselor through the employee assistance program, a woman named Dr. Elaine Morris who had the unnerving habit of letting me finish a sentence I wanted to abandon. When I told her I should have recognized the affair sooner, she asked what I imagined would have happened if I had accused Ryan six months earlier. I admitted that I probably would have been drawn into another argument about my suspicious nature.
"Then your problem wasn't a lack of observation," she said. "It was a relationship in which honest questions had become difficult to ask."
I sat with that for a long time. It was easier to blame myself for missing signs than to acknowledge that I had gradually learned to doubt the importance of my own perceptions. If the problem had been only my failure to notice, then I could promise to become more watchful and guarantee it would never happen again. Accepting that another person had chosen deception meant accepting a kind of uncertainty I could not control.
"I want to feel like myself again," I told her.
"Which part of yourself?" she asked.
I thought of the young woman who had laughed at Ryan's jokes in an Italian restaurant, the new flight attendant proud of her wings, the daughter helping her father inventory spare parts in the workshop. None of those people had been weak. They had been trusting, curious, and willing to love. "The part that didn't feel embarrassed about asking a question," I said.
She smiled gently. "Then we'll work on helping you listen to that part again."
Meanwhile, the company investigation moved through the slow, unglamorous stages that no viral video could summarize. Independent accountants reviewed invoices, bank records, purchase orders, and payments that had been approved without clear supporting work. Several questionable charges were traced to entities controlled by people connected to Ryan, but the auditors were careful to distinguish confirmed losses from unresolved discrepancies. Daniel supplied information and accepted that his earlier failure to escalate concerns would be examined too.
I learned about much of this indirectly, through my lawyers and the public records that gradually appeared. At first I checked the news every morning as though the next headline might explain everything. The habit made me tired and anxious. Eventually Camila suggested that I let her summarize meaningful developments rather than allowing Ryan's case to occupy every hour of my life.
"You can be informed without becoming a full-time witness to your own injury," she told me.
I wrote the sentence on a notecard and placed it in my flight bag. On difficult days I took it out between flights and read it again. It reminded me that the investigation belonged to the people conducting it, while my life still belonged to me.