He had warned me that the initial audit would only scratch the surface of Daniel’s holdings.

He had mentioned that the older files, the ones Daniel thought were buried in the off-site storage, held the real keys to our leverage.

I stared at the digital clock on the screen as the minutes ticked by.

The silence of the coastal night was deafening.

Then, the phone in my hand began to vibrate again.

The screen lit up with Robert Hayes’s name.

I pressed the phone to my ear, my breath catching in my throat.

“Robert?” I said.

“We found something,” he said, his voice unusually sharp.

“What did you find, Robert?” I asked, tightening my grip on the plastic casing of the phone.

I stood up and walked to the window, staring out into the blackness of the yard.

“The off-site boxes from the warehouse,” Robert said. “My assistant finished scanning the physical ledgers from five years ago.”

His voice sounded flat, stripped of its usual professional warmth.

“They aren’t just messy, Claire,” he continued. “They are completely different from the tax returns Daniel filed.”