beside her.

St.

Catherine’s director attended on speakerphone.

Lydia sat to my left with a folder thick enough to break noses.

Elijah tried charm first.

“Abby, let’s not make this uglier than it needs to be,” he said.

Janice cut across him.

“Mr.

Mercer, the ugliness appears to have started before this meeting.

We need to know whether company officers concealed a change in guarantee, a second mortgage, and the use of third-party compliance credentials on active contracts.”

Patricia shifted in her chair.

Nathan went very still.

Lydia slid copies of the gray file down the table.

Storage receipts.

Wire transfers.

The mortgage.

The forged board minutes.

Then she placed the St.

Catherine contract in front of Janice and tapped the stamped number at the bottom of each page.

“That certification belongs to Hart Project Services,” she said.

“Not Mercer Facilities Group.

Mrs.

Mercer did not transfer it.

She resigned oversight.

Continued use after notice would be misrepresentation.”

The project director’s voice came sharp through the speaker.

“Then the site is suspended effective immediately.”

Elijah turned toward me so fast his chair legs scraped.

“Abigail, tell them this is temporary.

Tell them you’ll reinstate.”

I looked at the man who had planned to humiliate me on my birthday with our children as witnesses and a mistress waiting in storage.

Then I looked at my son, who had treated me like a legal obstacle, and my daughter, who had wanted my pain preserved on video.

“No,” I said.

Patricia tried the wounded-girlfriend voice.

The transfers were reimbursements.

The storage unit was for staging inventory.

She knew nothing about a mortgage.

But Ron, the forensic accountant Lydia had engaged that morning, laid out the invoices against calendar records and project logs.

Patricia had billed for services on days no staff were on site and for furniture that never appeared on any property.

Her company existed mostly on paper and desire.

Janice closed her folder.

“The line of credit is frozen.

We are moving to default review.”

Nathan finally spoke, and when he did, he sounded young.

“There has to be a path to cure.”

“There was,” Lydia said.

“Honesty would have been one.”

Everything after that happened fast.

St.

Catherine terminated the contract by the following week.

The state licensing board opened an inquiry into the use of my certification.

Citizens Commercial demanded full documentation on the second mortgage and the forged board approvals.

Because the house had been cross-collateralized against the business line, Elijah’s precious victory over the deed became almost comic.

He had rushed to evict me from a property already sliding toward foreclosure.

Patricia disappeared before the month ended.

She took two suitcases, a designer coat Elijah had bought on a card tied to the company account, and whatever fantasy she had been living in.

She did not take Elijah.

Nathan’s firm placed him on administrative leave while the bar complaint sorted itself out.

He was not disbarred, but the public reprimand landed hard enough that every partner in that building knew his name for the wrong reason.

Sophia lost her role at the company the same day payroll officially failed.

For a woman who had once called my Honda embarrassing, she spent a very long month asking friends for rides.

By the end of that first week, I