Silence was the only thing that gave me time, and time was the only thing that was going to give me the truth.

Chapter 5 — Phoebe Reed

The person I called was Phoebe Reed.

Phoebe is a forensic accountant, the kind of person who can look at a river of ordinary-seeming transactions and see, where everyone else sees water, the single place where something was quietly pulled out.

My father had used her firm years ago to vet an acquisition, and I had never forgotten the cool, unhurried way she had said, in a meeting full of men who wanted the deal to be clean, that it was not clean, and precisely why.

I trusted her the way you trust a good surgeon: not to be gentle, but to be right.