And almost nothing real, almost no actual operation, underneath any of it — money flowing through, and through, and through, and never seeming to land anywhere or make anything.

I did not have the vocabulary yet for what I was looking at.

But even I, the wife who’d been told for fifteen years that she didn’t understand business, could see that a company through which that much money moved and in which that little was actually built was not what it claimed to be.

I couldn’t walk into a police station with an unmarked card and a bad feeling.

And Lachlan’s whole social world was money — his friends were judges’ golf partners and other men with firms like his.

I needed someone of my own.