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.

“Sit down, Trevor.”

He didn’t.

“Sit down, or my father comes in, and you don’t want my father in the room. Sit down.”

He sat.

I’d learned that from my father too.

You tell the person who thinks he’s in charge to sit down, and whether he sits tells you the whole rest of the meeting.

He sat.

“Collins Design Group,” I said.

His face did the thing.

The flicker.

“That’s— Vanessa has a design consultancy, it’s—”

“It has no clients, Trevor. It has one source of income. Me. Four hundred and ten thousand dollars over fourteen months, out of my operating account, labeled vendor deposits, signed by you, because you’ve been a signatory since 2019 and I forgot to take you off, and you counted on me forgetting, the way you counted on me not reading the club membership and not reading the card drawer and not reading, apparently, anything.”