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.

“That was him.”

“What did he want?”

“To be understood.”

My father snorted.

“They always do, at the end,” he said. “Forty of them across the table. The last thing they ever want, after the money and the lies, is for you to understand them. It’s the one thing you should never give them. You didn’t give it.”

“No.”

“Good. Lunch?”

“Lunch.”

PART 5 — FINAL

Marchetti Interiors had its best year this year.

I want to say that plainly, because the moral of a lot of these stories is “and then she rebuilt,” and mine isn’t that.

I didn’t rebuild.

The firm was never broken.

It was being bled, quietly, by a signatory I’d forgotten to remove, and the day I removed him the bleeding stopped, and the margins I’d blamed on the market came back in a single quarter, because they’d never been the market.

They’d been Trevor.

I read the statements now.