“Is the purple phone broken?” Sophie asked, pointing at the laptop cable.

“No,” I said, unplugging the cord and handing the toy back to her.

“It works just fine.”

I opened my legal notebook to a clean page and started writing a timeline outline for the coming hearing.

Grant had underestimated me from the day I left my corporate compliance career to raise our daughter.

He’d forgotten that before I ran our home in West Hartford, my job had been finding the money people tried to hide.

I played the crisp audio once more through my little laptop earbuds, checking every word.