You cannot be robbed for years by a person you watch closely.

You can only be robbed by the one you have decided never to watch at all, and Mark had decided that about Veronica fourteen years ago, and she had spent those fourteen years quietly turning his trust into her opportunity.

And she was, it emerged, the center of everything.

My attorney and I turned everything over to state law enforcement and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the digital logs, the temperature overrides, the toxicology, the text messages from Marcus’s phone.

And investigators recovered, from an encrypted folder on Mark’s laptop, the internal financial audit he had quietly initiated, the thing he had wanted to verify, the thing that had gotten him nearly killed.