At nine that morning a private car set me down outside a glass skyscraper in downtown Chicago.

It was the corporate headquarters of the firm where Alejandro worked.

And it was the one thing, in fifteen years, that he had never bothered to check — because if he had, at any point, run even a cursory search on the ownership of the very building he reported to every day, the whole edifice of his life would have come down years earlier.

The tower was owned by a real estate holding company controlled by my family’s foundation.

For years Alejandro had bragged to his friends that his firm occupied such prime real estate because of his own executive importance.

The truth was simpler and, for him, catastrophic: the chief executive of his firm, Stephen Miller, had been a close associate of my late father, and our family trust held a major investment stake in the company that signed my husband’s paychecks.