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.

Every month.

Myself.

My father taught me in one night and I’ve done it every month since, and my bookkeeper, Lonnie, who’d signed off on fourteen months of “vendor deposits” because the signatory signed off, cried when I showed him what he’d missed, and I told him it wasn’t his fault, a signatory’s a signatory, and then I took every signatory off every account except me, and Lonnie said “what if you get pneumonia again,” and I said “then the firm waits, Lonnie, the firm can wait three weeks, I can’t afford to forget a form again.”

My father consults now.

Not for the government.

For me.

Once a quarter he comes to the office and reads the statements beside me, not because I need him to, but because he likes it, and because somewhere in the last year the thing between us changed from a father protecting a daughter into two people who read statements together, which my father says is “the best thing that ever came out of the worst thing, and I’d know, I’ve seen a lot of worst things.”