Chloe cooperated with the prosecutors; her testimony reduced her own sentence, and it also ended, permanently, whatever loyalty had remained between them.

True love, it turns out, has its limits when the subpoenas start to arrive.

But there is one part of the aftermath that mattered more to me than any of Marcus’s punishments, and it is the part I insisted on personally.

When Rhodes Capital purchased the legitimate assets of Marcus’s collapsed company, through a court-supervised sale, we did it in a way that removed every executive who had touched the fraud, and preserved more than eighty jobs.

Because here is the thing that Marcus, who had viewed his company as an extension of his own ego, had never once understood: that beneath his fraudulent invoices and his shell companies were real people.