“Because of my mentor,” I say quietly.
“Yes. Leena Chowdhury.” His voice is rough. “The foundation scandal touched her charity, as you well know. When I first discovered the fraud Diana, our mutual client committed, I wrote memos arguing we should blow the whistle immediately. Cut ties, report to regulators, expose everything. But the board buried my objections. They wanted to exit quietly to protect the firm’s reputation. That delay gave Diana time to cover her tracks and pre-emptively shift blame onto her legal partners. Leena.”
Diana.
Diana Castellane.
She ran one of the most respected humanitarian organizations in the world, Castellane Global Relief Fund.
She was brilliant, charismatic, the kind of nonprofit leader who could charm money out of anyone and actually used that money to build wells in sub-Saharan Africa.
She partnered with organizations like Leena’s legal clinic to provide pro bono services to the communities her fund served.
Except it turned out Diana wasn’t just building wells. She was also building a nice little nest egg for herself through shell companies, inflated administrative costs, and grants that got diverted to places that had nothing to do with humanitarian relief.
When the scandal broke five years ago, it didn’t just destroy Diana. It took down everyone connected with her. Including Leena, whose legal clinic had provided services to Diana’s fund.
The narrative became: how could Leena not have known? How could she have been so negligent? Was she complicit or just incompetent?
Neither was true. But the court of public opinion doesn’t care about truth when there’s a good scandal to feast on.
And Corin’s firm had been Diana’s financial advisors.
I always assumed he and his firm had helped Diana cover it all up. Or at least looked the other way while she did.
Basically setting my mentor up for a fall.
It’s why I broke up with him.
“I thought if I kept pushing internally,” he continues. “I could force the board to act before it was too late. That we could contain it, minimize the damage to people like Leena who’d worked in good faith. But I was wrong. By the time the scandal broke, Diana was already ahead of the narrative. Leena got destroyed anyway.”
The air feels like it’s been sucked out of the room.
All this time I thought he was complicit. Thought he chose protecting a rich client’s reputation over doing the right thing.
But he was trying to protect Leena the whole time.
The mentor who taught me everything I know about being precise and humane in a field that rewards the opposite.
“But you protected Diana, your client, too,” I argue.
“I tried to protecteveryone.” His voice cracks just slightly, but I hear it. “Diana, Leena, the other partners who’d been kept in the dark. I actually thought I could thread the needle. Force accountability without collateral damage. But Diana had more moves than I anticipated. And the board had more to lose than I realized.”
“So why didn’t you tell me after?” I ask him. “Once it all blew up anyway. Once Leena was already implicated. Why let me thinkyouwere the villain who ruined Leena’s career?”
“Because it was too late by then. You would’ve never believed me.”
“You could havetried,” I say emphatically.
“You’d just watched your mentor’s reputation get destroyed,” he answers. “You were grieving, furious. And I had no proof. The memos I’d written were confidential board documents. If I’d shown them to you, I would have breached my fiduciary duty to our fund’s limited partners, as I mentioned. They would have sued me into oblivion, possibly brought criminal charges for violating confidentiality agreements. And even if I’d risked it, you were so angry, so hurt... you would have thought I was making excuses. Lying to save my own ass.”
Shit.
He’s right.
I would have thought exactly that.
I was a wreck when Leena’s name hit the papers. I’d just watched the woman who taught me everything lose her reputation overnight. And Corin’s firm had been advising the client at the center of it all.
