He could not cover the leased equipment, or the subcontractor advances, or the debt servicing that came due like clockwork every month regardless of what else was happening.

The whole intricate machine of his company, which had looked so solid from the outside, so impressive at dinners, turned out to depend on a steady flow of Whitmore money and Whitmore forbearance that had, without warning, simply stopped.

“This can’t be coincidence,” he murmured to his empty office.

But some part of him already knew it was not, and some part of him was already reaching, with dread, toward a memory of the night before — toward a quiet man in a gray jacket, and a sentence spoken with terrible calm on the way out the door.

Chapter 10 — What’s Emily’s Father’s Last Name