“Then let’s use it,” she said, “the right way, all the way to the end.”

Chapter 12 — Ledford

My grandfather’s oldest attorney was a man named Ferris Ledford, the architect of the family’s trusts, and he had been trying to reach me for a week.

I finally went to see him.

He was old and unwell and frightened, and he told me, in a book-lined study that smelled of paper and dust, the thing my family had spent thirty years not saying: that my grandfather had built Whitby Capital on money that was not clean, that there had been arrangements, that Silvia’s grievance was not entirely a fantasy.

He gave me a ledger — a real one, cracked-spined and yellowed — and he told me it documented the original sins the whole edifice was built on.