Marissa was no longer standing beside Eric.
She was staring at him as though she had just discovered a stranger wearing her lover’s face.
Two police officers arrived eighteen minutes later.
Eric immediately became calm.
Painfully calm.
He explained that there had been a misunderstanding.
He claimed the drive contained backups he had made because I was careless with company data.
I almost admired that lie too.
Then one officer asked a simple question.
“Do you work for Brooks Design Studio?”
“No.”
“Have you ever?”
“No.”
“Then why were you backing up its confidential files?”
Eric stopped talking.
The officers documented the drive and advised me not to alter its contents.
Catherine arrived shortly afterward and arranged for a forensic copy to be made.
The movers stopped working.
Suddenly, furniture seemed unimportant.
Before leaving, I looked at Eric.
“Was the affair even real?”
Marissa flinched.
Eric said nothing.
That silence frightened both of us.
I moved into a furnished apartment above my studio.
For the first three nights, I barely slept.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the folders.
Client names.
Contracts.
Financial information.
Then I remembered the missing drive.
Eleven months.
Eric had possessed it for almost a year.
Why?
Catherine brought in a forensic accountant named Samuel Reed.
He was sixty-three, soft-spoken, and possessed the unsettling ability to notice numbers other people ignored.
On Friday morning, he sat across from me in my conference room.
“I need you to prepare yourself.”
“For what?”
“This didn’t begin yesterday.”
He rotated his laptop.
A spreadsheet filled the screen.
Small withdrawals.
Vendor payments.
Reimbursements.
Consulting charges.
Nothing enormous.
Nothing obvious.
$3,800.
$6,200.
$4,950.
$7,100.
Spread across nearly three years.
Individually, they looked legitimate.
Together?
$642,000.
My mouth went dry.
“How did I miss this?”
“Because whoever did it understood your business.”
“Eric doesn’t understand my business.”
Samuel looked at me.
“Then somebody helped him.”
That sentence changed everything.
We examined the questionable payments.
Most went to vendors I recognized.
But when Samuel traced them further, the pattern became strange.
A legitimate vendor would receive $18,000.
Then, within days, $4,000 would be routed to a subcontractor.
That subcontractor would pay another company.
Eventually, money reached accounts associated with shell businesses.
One of those businesses had an address I knew.
I stared at the screen.
“No.”
Samuel looked at me.
“You recognize it?”
I stood.
It was my father’s old accounting office.
My father, Thomas Brooks, had died fourteen months earlier.
A heart attack at sixty-nine.
Sudden.
One morning he had called me to complain that I worked too much.
That evening he was gone.
I had spent months grieving him.
Dad had handled portions of my company’s accounting since the beginning.
He wasn’t technically an employee. He was my adviser, my emergency phone call, the person who had helped me build Brooks Design Studio from a folding table in my apartment into a firm employing twenty-six people.
His old office had been sold after his death.
Or so I thought.
Samuel pulled the property records.
The building hadn’t been sold.
