Marcus’s wife, learning all of it at once, filed for divorce.

And prosecutors charged all three conspirators — Adrian, Vanessa, and Marcus — with wire fraud and grand theft, because the money they had drained had come, in part, from Northstar’s employee medical fund, which is a particular kind of theft, the kind that steals from the sick to enrich the comfortable, and which judges do not look upon kindly.

Adrian avoided prison, in the end, by cooperating fully with the investigators — by handing them Vanessa and Marcus in exchange for his own skin, which was, I thought, a fittingly final act for him.

But he lost everything else: his career, his home, every title and option and allowance that had ever flowed to him through my trust.

And he learned, at last, a lesson that had been available to him for eight years for the price of simply reading what he signed: that putting your name to fraudulent documents without reading them is not, in the eyes of the law, the same thing as innocence.

Vanessa, whom the investigators proved had personally created the shell companies, received a prison sentence.