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.

He spent thirty-one years investigating financial fraud, most of it for a federal inspector general’s office, and when he speaks the way he spoke outside that courthouse, it’s not because he’s angry.

It’s because he’s already seen something you haven’t.

“Open every banking app you have,” he said.

“Dad—”

“Now.”

His voice left no room.

“Change every PIN. Every password. Personal cards. The business cards. The travel cards. The emergency accounts. The firm’s corporate cards. All of them. And then call your bank and remove every authorized user.”

“You think he’d actually—”

“Mari.” My father looked toward the parking lot, where Trevor and Vanessa were laughing beside a rented Escalade. “I think a man who can smile at his wife on the courthouse steps while his girlfriend holds his arm is a man who has already decided the rules don’t apply to him. I’ve interviewed forty of him. They all smile. Lock the cards.”