Eleanor Thorne was as good as her reputation.

She stripped Julian of every claim to my family’s trust, to our home, to the inheritance my father had worked a lifetime to leave me — the inheritance my father had, in his quiet wisdom, structured to be nearly impossible for a man like Julian to reach, as though he had seen this coming from years away.

And the federal forensic audit, once it started pulling threads, found everything: the shell accounts, the diverted holdings, the firm’s money he’d been quietly siphoning to fund a life in Aspen with a girl half my age.

He was stripped of his accounting license.