You would think that would be a devastating thing to learn at two in the morning beside your sleeping husband.

It was the most freeing thing that had happened to me in eight years.

Chapter 9 — The Quiet Case

The next morning I stopped being a wife and started being a lawyer, which was, it turned out, a great relief.

I took everything to my father through the private channel, and then to the board’s independent counsel, and we did the thing Rupert would never have had the patience for: we built it slowly and correctly.

A confidential investigation, papered properly, so that nothing we found could later be thrown out.

We let Rupert keep believing his promotion was not only secure but imminent, because a man who believes he is winning keeps generating evidence, and Rupert generated it beautifully — more transfers, more messages, more of the tidy documentation that arrogant men cannot help but leave, because they cannot imagine anyone ever reading it.

I also did something the strategy did not strictly require.

Three accountants in the finance department had noticed Cressida’s invoices before I did, had asked the wrong questions, and had been quietly threatened by Rupert into silence — their jobs, their references, their futures held over their heads.

I found each of them.