I felt something strange, reading through that file, and it was not the satisfaction you might expect.

It was closer to grief, and it surprised me.

Because I saw, laid out in fourteen months of doctored numbers, how ordinary the whole catastrophe had been.

There had been a moment, early on, when SwiftFreight had simply missed a target — a bad quarter, the kind every company has, survivable, forgivable.

And instead of reporting it, Gavin had chosen to hide it, a small lie, a little cosmetic touch to the numbers, surely just this once, surely just until things turned around.

But numbers do not work that way.