She had been an accountant herself, decades ago, and she was sharp to the end. She had seen the resolution. I found her last note to herself in a folder of her papers I’d never had the heart to open, in her shaking hand: Told B I know what he did to Lolly’s shares.

Tell her when she’s stronger. She never got the chance. Barrett had spent nine years counting on the fact that she never did.

That was the secret he’d hoped I would never find. Not a murder, not another woman. Something smaller and colder: he had tried to write me out of my own company while I was in a hospital bed, my dying mother had caught him, and he had let me believe the two of them were strangers so I’d never think to ask.

I didn’t scream when I understood it. I gave the phone logs and my mother’s note to the audit, and I filed a report on the forged resolution with the state, the way you’re supposed to.

The audit’s findings ended the divorce as a contest. Faced with the forgery, the phone records, and my mother’s note, Barrett stopped fighting for the money, because there was no version of the truth in which fighting helped him.

We settled. I kept my seventy-four percent. He kept his title and his salary and a minority stake, because the boys still needed their father employed and whole, and because I had decided a long time ago that I would not become someone who burned down a house with my own children inside it.