And then Luca’s voice, in the background: “Tell her the buyout is still open, if she stops behaving like a hysterical child.” I ended the call without another word.

They still thought they were negotiating.

They had not yet understood that the negotiation was over, and that they had lost it weeks ago, in a finance department they never watched, to a girl they never saw.

Chapter 8 — The Forensic Audit

At Flynn’s private office downtown, his physician cleaned and bandaged the cuts on my hand and my leg while I opened my laptop on his mahogany desk and showed him what I had.

I laid it out the way I would lay out any audit, without emotion, because the numbers need no emotion; they only need to be true.