I sat up the whole night with that ledger and with the toxicology report side by side on my kitchen table, and somewhere around dawn I understood how the two of them fit together.

The gaslighting had never been the whole plot.

It had been the cover for it.

Sennett hadn’t drugged me for six months out of cruelty or convenience; he’d done it to keep me foggy and unreliable and discredited during exactly the window in which someone was moving money — draining accounts, restructuring holdings, positioning Whitby Capital to be seized or sold before its rotten foundation could be exposed on someone else’s terms.

A CEO too clouded to read her own financial statements is a CEO who doesn’t notice the empire being hollowed out around her.

My incompetence hadn’t been the goal.