The family firm, the source of all their grandeur, had been hours from collapse.

Preston had told his family, grandly, that he had saved it himself — that he had rescued the company through what he called private venture investors, a phrase he used at dinner parties with tremendous self-satisfaction, the story of the son who had single-handedly pulled the empire back from the edge.

The investor was me.

Not a faceless fund.

Me.

Voss Capital, my own private investment firm, the one Preston had never taken the slightest interest in because he could not imagine his quiet wife running anything of consequence.

Three years ago, quietly, I had purchased the estate’s defaulted mortgage.