Chapter 3: What the Blue Folder Knew
My attorney's name was Grace Holloway.
She had represented Sterling Global for eleven years, and in all that time I had never once seen her rattled.
She was rattled now.
She set the blue folder on the conference table between us and pressed her palm flat against it before sliding it toward me.
"How much of this did you already know?" she asked.
"I knew Daniel had been moving money.
I knew the signatures were forged.
I knew about Chloe." I looked at the folder.
"I didn't know what was in there."
"The Sterling Global logo on that folder is a decoy," Grace said.
"The documents inside are not company records.
They're a shadow ledger.
Someone has been running a parallel set of books alongside Sterling's real accounts for at least four years."
Four years.
Daniel and I had been married for six.
"How much?" I asked.
"Across all the accounts we've identified so far — eleven point three million dollars."
The number sat in the air between us.
"Daniel didn't build this alone," Grace said.
"The structure is too clean.
Too layered.
Whoever designed it knew exactly how Sterling's internal controls worked."
"Someone inside the company."
"Almost certainly." She opened the folder and turned it to face me.
"There are three vendor accounts.
Two of them trace back to shell companies registered in Delaware.
The third one—" She tapped the page.
"The third one traces back to a man named Warren Pryce."
I went still.
Warren Pryce had been Sterling Global's Chief Financial Officer for nine years.
He had worked directly under my mother.
He had given a speech at her retirement dinner.
He had hugged me at her funeral.
"Warren," I said.
"His personal signature appears on six of the disbursement approvals," Grace said.
"Not a forgery.
His actual signature."
I stood up and walked to the window.
The city below was going about its morning.
Taxis.
Coffee cups.
People who had no idea.
"He was the one who taught me how to read a balance sheet," I said quietly.
"When I was nineteen.
My mother made him sit with me every Saturday for a whole summer."
Grace didn't say anything.
"Does he know we have this?"
"Not yet."
I turned around.
"How long before he finds out the accounts are frozen?"
"If he checks his access this morning — hours."
I thought about Daniel's last words.
*There are people involved in this who are not going to let you just walk away.*
Daniel hadn't been threatening me with strangers.
He had been warning me about Warren.
"We need to move faster than I planned," I said.
"I agree." Grace closed the folder.
"There's one more thing." She hesitated, which was something Grace Holloway almost never did.
"The authorization form with your forged signature — the first one you found three weeks ago.
We had a handwriting analyst look at it."
"And?"
"The forgery is technically very good.
But the analyst flagged something.
The pen pressure, the angle — it matches a left-handed writer imitating a right-handed one." She looked at me carefully.
"Daniel is right-handed."
I felt the floor shift slightly beneath me.
"Warren Pryce is left-handed," I said.
Grace nodded once.
My phone buzzed on the table.
Unknown number.
I picked it up.
The voice on the other end was smooth and unhurried, as if we were discussing lunch plans.
"Audrey.
It's Warren.
May you like
I think we should talk before this goes any further.
Don't you?"
