“Dad approved every cent of that,” Leon said.

“That was your first mistake,” I told him.

“You assumed that because I never said anything, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.”

For years, Leon had told people I did “spreadsheet babysitting.” He’d described my job to relatives, laughing, as counting other people’s money in a basement somewhere.

He had never once been curious enough to learn what I actually did — which was to lead forensic investigations for an international firm, tracing exactly this kind of theft through exactly these kinds of shell companies and dressed-up invoices, for a living, at a level most people in that room could not have imagined.

My brother had spent a decade mocking the one skill on earth most precisely designed to destroy him.