Rhodes,” she said, holding a stack of reports.

“I never had the chance to thank you.

When the news broke about the old board, we thought we were all going down with them.” “You didn’t build the shell companies,” I told her.

“You built the product.

There’s a difference.” “Still,” she said.

“Most partners would have liquidated the assets and walked away with the write-off.

You actually looked at the work.” And as I rode the elevator down, her words stayed with me, because they named the exact thing Marcus had spent our marriage mocking. No one gets rich checking paperwork, he had sneered, across our kitchen table, so many times.

He had never understood that reading the paperwork was not merely my job.