Impulse had cost me three years and nearly cost my father his life.

This time I would be slow, and I would be careful, and I would be right.

I hired a senior forensic accountant and an aggressive white-collar criminal attorney.

Quietly, over days, we assembled everything — certified backups of the server logs, the bank records, and my father’s notebook — and we took it not to Maya but to the state prosecutors.

Several of the shell companies Ryan had built were registered in other people’s names, deliberately, so that a premature confrontation would only warn them and give them time to liquidate the accounts and run.

My lawyers were emphatic on this point, and for once in my life I listened to advice instead of my temper.