She blinked and leaned closer. The first-digit histogram sat on the right side of the monitor screaming at her. It showed a jagged skyline where there should have been a smooth descent. Too many nines. Not enough ones. The distribution slanted off course.
That couldn’t be right. She frowned and worried her lip between her teeth.
Maybe she’d pointed the macro at the wrong sheet. She checked the range. Correct. She widened the range to include an additional ledger. The bars shivered and settled—still wrong.
Most people had never heard of Benford’s Law, and even Norah rarely used it. The basic idea was that in natural data, ones appear as the first digit most often, nines least. It was a fingerprint of honesty. NorthBridge’s numbers didn’t follow the law.
She flipped to a clean tab and ran a control, selecting an unrelated dataset from a different client that she knew was clean. The familiar gentle slope appeared, textbook perfect. Then she switched back to NorthBridge.
Jagged again.
Her mouth went dry. She rolled her chair back an inch and then forward again, restless. Explanations queued up like polite guests. Maybe a seasonal issue skewed purchasing, maybe a merger artifact created an artificial lump, maybe...
She ran an additional test—first two-digit Benford—just to punish the hypothesis. Within the second-digit distribution, the anomaly persisted, lean where it should’ve been generous, crowded where it should’ve been sparse.
This wasn’t sloppy bookkeeping. No harmless data quirk. Someone had forced the digits. They’d bent them and hammeredthem into place where they didn’t belong. Hidden well enough most analysts wouldn’t look twice.
But she had.
Norah glanced at the time in the corner of her screen after her additional analysis. 9:47 p.m. She imagined the Thai place’s door chime and the blast of basil and chili heat when it opened. She thought about calling it a night. She’d flagged the anomaly, that was enough. That was her job, after all.
Her hand moved before she’d fully decided, clicking twice. She rose, chair sliding soundlessly back, and crossed to the printer against the wall. The low machine hummed and then spat a page into the tray with a mechanical sigh.
She folded it in half, then in half again, careful and precise, as if the act of neatness could make the contents less volatile. She slid the paper into the back of her notebook, between a blank page and a receipt for dry cleaning. This was a secret she wasn’t ready to share. Why would she raise any alarms? It was probably nothing.
There was no reason to think NorthBridge wasn’t clean.
Back at her desk, she reran the analysis, because thoroughness was her middle name. Same result. She split the NorthBridge data into subledgers—packaging, transport, maintenance, real estate—and ran the tests separately. Packaging looked close to normal. Transport didn’t. Real estate was the loudest offender, its digits marching in a way that made her skin prickle.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She opened a new folder in her personal workspace—Working – NB anomalies—then immediately hated the title for being too on-the-nose. She renamed itNB_Notesand created a blank document inside, the digital equivalent of a cleared throat. She typed one line:Benford deviation – initial flagand then stared at it, the cursor blinking like an impatient metronome.
This was just diligence, a curiosity to satisfy before the acquisition closed. She’d show the cleanest version of this to Richard Hale. She would get his take and let him decide if it needed to go anywhere. Richard had hired her when she was an unknown with a résumé that didn’t glitter properly. He’d vouched for her when a partner wanted someone with a fancier pedigree. He trusted her to be cautious and thorough. He paid her to be right.
He also trusted her not to make trouble without proof.
Norah minimized the document and opened a browser tab instead, fingers moving before she could second-guess. She searched public filings for NorthBridge Energy—SEC submissions, quarterly calls, and dry press releases. She skimmed an earnings transcript where the CFO used too many adverbs and thanked the audit team by name. She pulled down a vendor list and scanned for outliers. She made a note to check which audit firm had the real estate holdings subsidiary—if it was a small regional outfit, the odds of missing this went up.
Her phone lit up face-down, casting a pale rectangle across the blotter. A quick glance showed a group text from college friends with a photo of someone’s new baby pressed between smiling parents. Norah clicked the screen dark with a knuckle. She was happy for them. She also hadn’t held a conversation with any of them that lasted more than five minutes in months, unless you counted heart emojis.
She rubbed the heel of her palm under her collarbone, surprised at the tender ache there. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t even fear. It was the feeling of a hinge shifting in her life—quietly, but decisively—as if a door she hadn’t noticed in her own house had swung open.
The city outside blinked like it had all the answers. Norah whispered the anchor she always came back to, the one thingthat steadied her more than prayer ever had. “Numbers don’t lie.”
Prayer hadn’t done much for her when her world splintered. Math had never left her.
She turned back to the spreadsheet and made herself do the ordinary things. Save the file, archive a copy to the project folder, email herself a sanitized note about “variance checks complete” because the paper trail mattered and future-Norah would want to know what past-Norah had done—and when. Then she opened a new workbook and started recreating the test by hand, cell by cell, as if the labor of it might expose a flaw she’d missed. She didn’t find one.
She checked the time again. 10:31 p.m.
It was too late for curry. She could still go home, feed the cat, stand barefoot in her kitchen and feel the cool tile under her feet and try not to think about how quiet the apartment would be. She could pretend not to hear her mother’s voice in her head, lined with accusation and old disappointment. She could ignore the way Mrs. Kelley’s smiling voice had made something inside her ache, and the way she’d fled the conversation before the ache turned into a conversation she could not have.
If the numbers were telling the truth, then someone wasn’t.
Her cursor hovered over the project team chat. One message to the group and she could push this into official daylight. “Flagged an anomaly. Would like a second set of eyes in the morning.” That would be responsible. Sensible.
She slid the folded printout deeper into the notebook’s back pocket until the edge no longer showed. She gathered the NorthBridge files into a straighter stack. She eyed the crocheted mouse, and the absurdity of its presence here made her want to laugh, or cry, or both.
Cleo would be waiting.
