And today, with my daughter still tethered to a monitor two floors above us, they’d tried to move a vote up four days and erase the one outside record that could prove it.
“I’m going to be at that meeting,” I said.
Priya closed the laptop.
“There’s a fourth thing,” Priya said, before I could stand up. “Small, but it bothered me enough to check twice. Six weeks ago, Vanessa opened a personal account at a bank Whitaker doesn’t use — joint with no one, just her name — and she’s moved sixty-one thousand dollars into it since, in deposits kept just under the ten-thousand-dollar reporting threshold. That’s not sloppy bookkeeping. That’s someone who knows exactly where the line sits and is staying under it on purpose.”
I thought of her hands closing around that bottle on the security footage. Steady. Unhurried. A woman who had clearly rehearsed this kind of math long before my daughter’s birthday.
