“They’re wrong,” Phoebe said.

“Yes,” I said.

“They are.”

Because here is what Phoebe and I had built into the company’s structure years earlier, in the dry careful language of corporate governance, on an ordinary afternoon when it had felt almost paranoid to bother: my forty-percent ownership carried special protective rights.

If the officers of the company were ever found to have committed fraud against the corporation itself, I had the standing to petition to freeze certain transactions and to trigger an independent forensic audit of the entire enterprise.

It had seemed, when we drafted it, like insurance against a catastrophe that would never come.