Most people would have.

But I pulled the thread, the way I had been trained to, and the thread kept coming.

The consulting firm led to a second firm, and the second to a third, and all three led, through enough shell layers to discourage a casual auditor, back to a single individual: Cressida Delacroix’s brother.

I found altered invoices, the numbers changed after approval.

I found private hotel charges dressed up as recruitment expenses — Rupert and Cressida, weekends I had been told were business travel.

And I found something that stopped being a marital humiliation and became a crime: drafts of a plan to sell the company’s proprietary software to a competitor, the crown jewel of everything my grandfather had built, packaged for sale by a man who thought of it as his to sell.

I did not confront him.

I want to be clear about that, because it was the hardest thing I have ever not done.

Every night for six months I sat across a dinner table from a man I now knew was robbing my family, and I passed him the salt, and I asked about his day.

People ask me, when they hear this part, how I could stand it — how I could lie beside him, and cook the dinners, and play the domestic wife he’d cast me as, all while the case against him grew in a folder he didn’t know existed.