She is a project manager and she is good at it, dependencies, burn rates, a color legend her team actually uses. At 2:50 on a Wednesday morning she opened a fresh workbook in the dark kitchen and titled it BASELINE. Columns for date, merchant, amount, category, and one she labeled AVOIDABLE, with a dropdown offering Yes, No, and Partly.

By 4:15 she had eleven months reconciled to the dollar and a pivot table broken out by weekday. Tuesdays were the worst. She wrote a conditional format to turn anything over two hundred red, and the sheet went red nearly everywhere, and she looked at it with the wine gone warm beside the trackpad. Then she added a tab named NEXT MONTH and left it empty.