Five minutes after my divorce was final, my father gripped my arm outside the courthouse and said, “Block every card, right now.” That night my ex tried to spend $300,000 on his mistress’s sapphire necklace with my company’s black card — in a club my firm owned.

I didn’t go to bed.

I sat up with my father and the legal pad until two, and he showed me how to read my own company’s statements, line by line, the way I should have been reading them for a year, and somewhere around one in the morning I stopped crying about Trevor and started doing arithmetic about Trevor, which my father said was “the exact moment every victim becomes a witness, and it’s my favorite moment in the job.”

PART 3

Trevor came to my office at nine the next morning.

He hadn’t slept.

Vanessa wasn’t with him.

He had the black card in his hand, the dead one, and he put it on my desk like it had wronged him.

“You humiliated me,” he said. “In front of the whole club. Desmond made me give the necklace back at the table. Vanessa took a cab home. Do you know what that— Mari, I need you to turn the cards back on. There’s been a mistake. We’re still untangling things. The club membership, the cards, that’s all going to get sorted in the settlement, you can’t just—”