I stopped reading the first contract.

And I went looking, at last, for the second.

Chapter 9 — The Architecture I Built

Here is the thing Charles Mercer never understood, the thing that undid him in the end: I had known for years.

I did not become a corporate fraud attorney by accident.

I became one because, in my late twenties, going through my father’s papers for an entirely different reason, I had found the first thread — a return that was too smooth, a transfer that wore two names — and I had recognized, with a daughter’s cold horror, that the trusted family friend managing our fortune was stealing from it.

I could have confronted him then.