Rosalind Halloran had trained me, twenty years before, when I was a raw young forensic accountant at the Attorney General’s office and she was already a legend there, the woman who had put away men everyone said were untouchable.

She had taught me the trade — how to read a set of books the way a doctor reads an X-ray, how to find the one number that doesn’t breathe right in a thousand honest ones, how to build a case so tight that no amount of money could buy a hole in it.

And then I had left it all to marry Roman, and she had told me, once, with the bluntness that was her whole personality, that she thought I was making a mistake — not about the man, she said, she didn’t know the man, but about myself, about mistaking a smaller life for a safer one.

I had been offended for years.