While you smiled at me across the breakfast table every morning, you were planning this.” “I planned it,” I said, “while you were charging hotel suites to the company and coming home to tell me the business was struggling.”

Chapter 6 — Sixty-Two Percent

That landed, because he had not known I knew about the hotel suites.

But the hotel suites were the smallest of the things I knew.

Six weeks earlier, our controller, Marisol, had come to me — quietly, because she was frightened, and right to be — with an invoice for a lighting installation that had been paid for in full and never delivered.

I had still been reviewing the company’s quarterly finances all along, a right I had never surrendered, because my grandmother’s trust had supplied Halstead House with its original capital, every dollar of its first breath.