Then I forwarded the entire thing — the images, the message, the timestamp — to my attorney, without a word of comment, because no comment was necessary.

And then I got dressed, and I went to work, to the company I owned and he only worked at, and I did the thing I actually am good at, the thing my sister had meant as an insult.

I opened the spreadsheets.

Chapter 8 — The Audit

Here is what six months of quiet work had already shown me, long before that anniversary dinner, and why I had been so strangely calm signing those papers.

For half a year, I had been tracing a series of irregular payments flowing out of Northstar Medical to three separate consulting firms.