When I saw that the money was missing, I went straight toAnders, riding the gilded elevator to his penthouse office, which looked out over lower Manhattan.
“We’re going to look into this,” my former boss told me, and I believed him.
It happened gradually at first. I began losing clients. I was taken off accounts. Soon my entire team at ACR Bank was reassigned, essentially demoting me to an entry-level position. Suddenly my name was nuclear, and since every friend I had worked in finance, they all disappeared too.
It had taken me five years to build my career, and it took only three months for it all to disappear.
By the time I went to the authorities with my suspicions—that the missing money wasn’t an accounting error, that Holt Capital was skimming from the fund to pay off bad trades—it was too late.
Anders had gone to them first.
And he’d pointed the finger at me.
Now I’ve been exiled from the New York finance world and am scrambling to prove that the world-famous Anders Holt embezzled what turned out to be millions of dollars from his hedge fun. That I discovered it. That I blew the whistle on him, not the other way around.
And even though I have saved every scrap of paper and byte of data like a financial pack rat, even though I documentedeverything, it is still a very hard, very expensive battle to prove my innocence. It’s Holt’s lawyers versus me, with the US government playing referee. I have hope that the feds will believe me, but I just might break before we even get to court. Every day the investigation drags on is another day my name is dragged through the mud. It’s another day I have to pay Marcel to take meetings and transfer documents, to ask and answer questions.
Which is why I’m lifting weights with senior citizens in central Indiana on a Monday in May.
Unemployed.
And crashing with my sister’s best friend.
In the small town I vowed to get the fuck out of.
“I can see you thinking too hard,” Norm says from the bench. He nods at the dumbbells I dropped on the floor. “Tell it to the iron.”
Which is good advice, because curling the sixties burns so badly that the effort finally clears my mind.
Almost. Because even while counting reps, a small part of my mind is still wandering down dark hallways.
The ones that lead to Carson’s bedroom.
I’m more than halfway through my workout when Archer finally shows up. My oldest brother is a former professional hockey player who became a high school history teacher and hockey coach after a career-ending injury. He likes to pretend that he’s still a serious gym rat, but as soon as summer rolls around and he’s faced with two months of freedom, that six a.m. gym time starts drifting later and later.
I love my brother, but I never mind when he’s late. Because Archer? Archer is a talker.
He’s not even done fucking around with his setup, adjusting the bench and placing dumbbells, before he starts his inquisition.
“Are you ever going to tell us what the hell is going on?”
I’m midway through a set of chest presses with eighty-pound dumbbells, so I decide to fuck with him.
“Yeah,” I grunt through gritted teeth.
“When?”
I drop the weights with a thud. “When I’m sure you’re not going to get called in to testify about our conversations.”
Archer glares at me. “Dude, I would never sell you out.”
“I know that. But do you know how much Manhattan lawyers charge per hour?”
“More than I make in a week,” Archer says.
I glance at him between reps. “Try a month. You’d be looking at a year’s worth of paychecks to get through a deposition.”
He sighs. “I just hate that you’re doing this alone.”
