The first client through my door was a woman running a mid-sized manufacturing company she’d inherited from her own father, and she came to me because she’d read about what happened and thought — correctly — that a person who had cooperated with the government against her own family’s fortune might be someone she could trust with her books.

She could not have paid me a tenth of what I’d once billed for an afternoon.

I took the work anyway, and I did it well, and when it was done she referred me to two more like her, and that is how the firm grew: not through the old machinery of leverage and secrets and the quiet threat, but through the oldest and least glamorous engine in business, which is simply doing what you said you would do and being able to look anyone in the eye afterward.

I employed six people within the first year.

I knew every one of their names and every line of every account we touched.

There was no safe I couldn’t open, no ledger I couldn’t show a regulator, no folder that would have destroyed me if a stranger read it aloud.