I had opened my own firm by then.

I had spent my whole career making other people’s numbers tell the truth; it was long past time I built something with my own name over the door.

Ellsworth Forensic Audit — the family name I’d spent a marriage hiding, put up in plain daylight at last, because I was done being anyone’s secret.

That morning, a message had come in from Rowan. I wish I could undo everything.

I looked up from the phone at my son, red-cheeked and delighted in my father’s arms, and I found that the message stirred nothing in me at all — not anger, not vindication, not even the small satisfying warmth of being right.