had believed the steadiness in his face. She had believed he saw her as an equal because that was what he had said, and because men skilled at admiration often know exactly how to speak to competent women who are tired of being either envied or challenged.
She closed the ring box and put it away.
At 11:17 a.m., her office manager, Dana, called.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Dana said, “but there’s one transfer I can’t reconcile.”
Nora’s hand tightened on the banister. “From when?”
“After midnight. It used your executive code.”
“That’s impossible.”
“That’s what I thought. I’ve frozen the destination account, but only temporarily. It’s routed through one of the vendors we flagged this morning.”
Nora went very still.
After midnight meant after the confrontation. After the dress. After she had locked herself in the office. Which meant either Grant had made the transfer before the systems reset and hidden the timestamp inside a delayed batch, or someone else with access had done it for him.
There were very few people who could have touched that code.
Nora thought suddenly of her office administrator, Elise, who had looked nervous for weeks. She thought of the forwarded emails. She thought of the odd pause when Elise handed Grant a folder at Christmas and quickly said it was “for the seating chart.”
“Send me everything,” Nora said.
She hung up and walked back into the office.
On the desk, beside the monitors and legal pads and external drives, sat the box containing the ruined dress.
Nora placed her palm flat on it.
The humiliation of the night before no longer felt like an ending.
It felt like the door to a room she had finally decided to enter fully lit.
She sat down, opened the transfer file, and began reading line by line.
Outside, the winter sun shifted across the front windows of the house that had always been hers.
Inside, the real accounting had only just begun.
