They had built their whole scheme on a single false assumption: that the company was Adrian’s to plunder.

It never had been.

It was mine.

And I had been watching the money leave the entire time.

People have asked me, since, why I did not stop it sooner — why, if I could see eleven million dollars flowing out of my company through fake firms, I let it keep flowing for six months rather than freezing the accounts the day I understood.

And it is a fair question, and the answer reveals something about the difference between anger and strategy that took me my whole career to learn.