He brought children’s picture books instead of extravagant gifts.

He spent hours on the grass.

And he respected, scrupulously, without a single exception, every boundary Mabel drew, because he understood that the boundaries were the test, and that a man who wanted to prove he could stay did not get to decide which of the rules he would honor.

But he did one more thing, quietly, that he did not mention, because it was not yet his to promise and might come to nothing.

He quietly set his private legal team and his senior forensic accountants, and he set them the task of doing, to the four-year-old embezzlement case at the Vance enterprise, exactly what his firm did every day to the frauds of the powerful: taking it apart, transaction by transaction, until it told the truth.

Because a self-made billionaire who has spent his career finding out how rich men steal has one thing an ordinary framed accountant does not.