And the money the fraud needed — to plug a hole, to clear an audit, to keep the whole scheme from collapsing — was, I would soon learn, my grandmother’s three point eight million dollars.

Chapter 10 — The Laptop

Then I remembered the laptop.

Months earlier, during a home renovation, Bruno had left an old personal laptop in the guest room of my sister’s house, and forgotten it there, and it was still quietly syncing to a cloud drive we had once shared.

I called my sister, and I told her, very carefully, not to open a single file, not to touch it, but to hand the device directly and only to my legal team, so that its contents could be forensically preserved with an unbroken chain of custody.

I had learned, by then, to think like the prosecutor I was becoming.