I set my cup down. Slowly. The kind of slow that makes a room go quiet without anyone knowing why.
“Brennan,” I said, “do me a favor. Open your laptop.”
He snorted. “Why, you gonna show me your LinkedIn?”
“No. I’m going to show you yours.”
The interns stopped pretending not to listen. Brennan rolled his eyes and flipped open his MacBook just to humor the room. His email was already loading. The top message was from Compliance — my department — flagged red. Subject line: Unauthorized Reallocation, Accounts 4471 through 4499.
His face did that thing faces do when the blood remembers somewhere else to be.
“I filed it nineteen minutes ago,” I said. “Right before I came down for tea. Forty-one transfers. Every one of them in your handwriting, electronically speaking. The Hadley trust. The Okafor pension. Mrs. Liu’s grandchildren’s college fund. You moved them into a shadow portfolio under your initials and skimmed the management fees into a Cayman shell you registered in your girlfriend’s name. Cute, by the way. She spelled ‘Brennan’ wrong on the incorporation docs.”
He stood up so fast his chair hit the wall. “You can’t prove —”
“I already did. Your uncle got the same email. So did the SEC liaison. So did Mrs. Liu, who, by the way, taught second grade for thirty-six years and asked me very politely this morning if she should bring her own lawyer or borrow mine.”
The elevator dinged behind him. Two men in gray suits stepped out. Not police. Worse. Internal Affairs from the parent firm.
Brennan looked at me, and for the first time I saw him as small. Just a boy who’d been told his whole life that smelling like money meant he was made of it.
“I smell like a daycare,” I said softly, picking up my tea again, “because I raise a human being. You smell like cologne and someone else’s retirement.”
The interns didn’t laugh. They just watched him walk out between the gray suits, and one of them — a girl, maybe twenty-two — quietly slid her own resignation letter back into her bag.
I finished my tea. It was still warm.
