Over the past eight months, Danforth Capital’s audit team had quietly assembled a picture of Beckworth Urban Development that had made even her seasoned lawyer go still when he presented it — unauthorized transfers, altered agreements, and a long string of payments from Lucius’s company to an outside consulting business registered under a single name: Seraphine Ashby’s.

Ambrose had advised her, months ago, to act at once.

She had delayed.

Some stubborn, hopeful part of her had kept insisting there might be an explanation, that the man she had married could not possibly be the man the documents described.

She was not proud of the delay, in retrospect, but she understood it.

Every month she had waited had cost the company something and had cost her something more, and she had waited anyway, because acting meant accepting a truth she was not yet ready to hold: that the entire thing had been a fraud, not just the money but the marriage, and that the warmth she had built her life on had never been real.