Graham looked at the totals. “Seventy-two thousand. Give or take.”
I stared at the number until it stopped looking like a number and started looking like a death sentence.
Seventy-two thousand dollars. Stolen from a business that ran on margins so thin I could feel them snap.
“Denise is off today,” I said, reaching for my phone. “But she needs to see this.”
Denise arrived twenty minutes later.
She came in the way she always came through doors. Brisk, purposeful, slightly out of breath. Jeans and a pullover, hair in a ponytail instead of its usual neat twist.
Her eyes went straight to Graham.
“Hey,” she said, then looked at me. “What’s going on?”
“Graham’s been helping me sort through the statements,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Sandra called this morning and I needed someone to help organize the paperwork.”
I felt my neck flush and willed it to stop. Denise was going to see it the same way Kaya had, the ease between us, the invisible thread connecting our bodies.
But she just nodded. “Okay. What’ve you got?”
I turned the laptop toward her and showed her the spreadsheet.
“Sandra flagged discrepancies in the quarterly reconciliation this morning,” I said. “Vendor payments that don’t match approved invoices. We’ve been going through six months of records.”
Denise’s eyes moved across the screen.
“Every transaction traces back to Taylor’s credentials,” I said. “His digital signature is on all of it.”
Denise’s face went rigid.
“What?” she whispered. “That’s not— Rose, that can’t be right.”
“It’s right. Sandra confirmed the pattern. And the companies he’s been paying, like TKM Digital, they’re shells, Denise. No real operations, no verifiable clients. Just business registrations filed in the last six months.”
Denise stood up. Paced to the window. Came back.
“That fucking son of a bitch,” she said, her voice cracking. “I brought him here. Ivouchedfor him. I told you he wastrustworthy and this whole time he’s been—” She broke off, pressing her hand over her mouth. Her eyes filled. “How much?”
“At least seventy thousand.”
Denise made a sound like she’d been hit. She sank back into the chair and covered her face.
“I’m so sorry,” she said through her fingers. “Rose, I’m so fucking sorry. I gave him access to everything because I trusted him and I—” Her voice broke. “I should have been checking his work. I should have been watching.”
My throat ached. This was my best friend. The woman who’d helped me build this business from nothing, who’d held me through every crisis.
She was crying in my office because the man she loved had stolen from me.
I moved to the chair beside her and put my hand on her back.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You didn’t know.”
Denise looked up, eyes red, mascara tracking down her cheeks. “What do we do?”
“Obviously, I’m going to fire Taylor. And I’m calling the sheriff in the morning.”
“Yes.” Denise nodded rapidly, wiping her face, straightening, shifting into the mode I’d seen a hundred times. Crisis management. “Absolutely. Fire him and file a report. I’ll pull together everything I have on his access logs. Every system he touched, every login, every timestamp. We’ll build a case so tight he can’t breathe.”
