“Kelvin, I hope your prenup is strong.” The whispers moved through the crowd like wind through grass.

I looked at the numbers on the screen and felt something almost like admiration for the sheer audacity of it.

She had taken her own crime — the diversion of charity money into Ravenel accounts — and simply pasted my name over the parts that implicated her, on the theory that a big enough screen and a confident enough voice would make four hundred people accept whatever they were shown.

And she was not entirely wrong to think so.

That is how it usually works.

Most people do not read financial documents; they read the face of the person presenting them, and Seraphina’s face was beautiful and certain and expensive, and mine was the face of a woman whose dress had just been torn.