Had been protecting me, and arming me, and trusting me, all while I thought I was simply nursing an anxious old man through his worries.

Every one of those careful questions came back to me now with its true weight. How would a court establish that a signature was forged, Genevieve? I had answered him the way you answer a child asking about a nightmare, soothingly, thoroughly, never once suspecting he was taking notes.

And underneath the grief, rising slowly, was something colder and steadier, the thing my whole professional life had trained into me.

Because I do this for a living.

I sit with spreadsheets that other people find impenetrable and I find, in the numbers, the exact place where a story stops being true.

I follow money through the shell companies and the layered transfers and the friendly-sounding “management arrangements” that are really just theft wearing a suit, and I have never once, in years of it, felt the way I felt in that room — which was that for the first time the numbers before me were mine.