I opened the accounting software and started pulling records.
Graham foundme two hours later.
I hadn’t left the office. Bank statements covered the desk in rows, printed, highlighted, cross-referenced against invoices I’d pulled from the filing cabinet. The laptop was open to the vendor payment history. A legal pad sat beside me, filling up with line items that refused to add up.
“I knocked twice,” Graham said from the doorway. “You didn’t hear me.”
I looked up. I must have looked worse than I thought, because his expression shifted from curious to concerned.
“What happened?”
“My accountant called.” I pushed a hand through my hair. “Someone’s been stealing from me.”
He came in and closed the door. Pulled the chair from the corner and sat beside the desk.
“Show me,” he said.
I laid it out. The vendor overcharges, the vanished deposit, what I’d been finding.
Graham was quiet for a beat too long.
“What?” I said.
He rubbed the back of his neck, the gesture he made when he was choosing his words carefully, which I’d learned meant the words mattered.
“Olivia found something,” he said. “After you mentioned the Ridgeline invoice, the numbers didn’t sit right with me, so I asked her to pull public filings.” He met my eyes. “Ridgeline Supply is registered through TKM Digital Solutions. And TKM Digital is registered to Taylor Marsh.”
I stared at him.
“Denise’s Taylor,” I said.
“Aye.”
The bank statements on my desk looked different now. Not like a puzzle I was solving but like a trap I’d been sitting inside for months.
“How long have you known this?” I asked, my eyes narrowing.
“Just found out a few hours ago. Honestly. I didn’t know how deep it went, and I didn’t want to come to you with half a picture and have it sound like—” He stopped himself.
“Like the man who lied about his identity was now accusing my best friend’s boyfriend of stealing from me.”
He held my gaze. “Aye. Exactly like that.”
I wanted to be angry at him for not telling me right away. Part of me was. But the part of me that had spent six years learning to read people knew he was right. If he’d come to me earlier with nothing but a theory, I would have thrown him out.
“Sandra needs me to flag anything that doesn’t match an invoice I personally approved, but I keep getting lost cross-referencing,” I said, pushing past it.
Graham picked up the legal pad. “I’ll help. Tell me what to write.”
We worked through it line by line. I’d read each statement, vendor name, date, amount, and check it against my invoice files. When something matched, we moved on. When it didn’t, I’d call out the details and Graham would log them: companyname, date, amount charged, what the original quote had been if one existed, and whether I’d authorized the payment.
The list grew.
By five o’clock, we had seventeen flagged transactions spanning last year. Payments to companies with no verifiable operations. Legitimate vendors with inflated charges, overages of two or three thousand dollars each, small enough to slip past a busy owner who trusted her partner to manage the details. Service fees for maintenance contracts I’d never signed.
And every single one carried Taylor Marsh’s digital signature.
“How much?” I asked.
