takeout on the balcony of my condo, twenty floors above downtown Chicago. I had bought it three years earlier, before meeting him, after a decade of saving, investing, and working brutal hours as a forensic accountant. No family money. No inheritance. Just discipline.
I had spent years tracing fraud for people who smiled across conference tables while burying liabilities in footnotes. Ethan knew my job title but treated it like boring office work. He never understood that my career rested on one rule: when the numbers and the story disagree,
