Not long after my wedding, he had put his life’s savings into a technology company — Whitman Tech Solutions — and before he died, he had transferred every share of it into my name.

I had never looked at them.

Grief, and then a marriage that steadily crowded out anything that was mine, and the papers had sat in a box under old toys for years, unread.

That night I opened the blue folder, set my laptop beside it, and began to cross-reference my father’s equity manifests against the public filings on record.

And what I found there stopped the breath in my chest.

Chapter 9 — Forty Percent