He wasn’t.

The fraud was lazy and arrogant, the work of someone who had never once imagined being audited — the personal charges barely disguised, the shell company registered to a cousin with the same address on file, the fake client retreats scheduled over holiday weekends.

He had stolen the way he had treated me: with the lazy confidence of a man who believed the rules were for other people and that no one would ever bother to check.

For years no one had.

He had a director’s title and a booming voice and a way of making junior staff feel that questioning him was career suicide, and that had been enough to keep the lights off over his corner of the company for a long time.

Human resources had three complaints on file, all from junior finance staff, all describing the same thing: a director pressuring them to sign off on receipts they knew were false.