I let Nathan believe he’d broken me.

I let both of them think I was the softest target in the room.

And underneath the performance, quietly, over months, I built my own architecture around theirs — decoy accounts that showed fat, healthy, entirely fictional returns, designed to keep Charles confident that the primary trust was fat and healthy and unwatched.

Fake activity.

Fake balances.

A whole convincing financial theater, built by a woman they had both agreed was too fragile to balance a checkbook.

The primary trust that Charles believed he was still draining had, in fact, been empty for six months.