POV: Sophie Mitchell
Three weeks of secret meetings and Sophie is learning a language she never thought she'd need to speak.
Jessica's office becomes their war room. Financial documents cover every surface. Chen, the analyst Jessica brought in, walks Sophie through balance sheets like he's teaching her to read. Patricia, the lawyer, explains what questions to ask when something looks wrong.
Sophie works the coffee shop during the day and studies Ashford Holdings at night. She's functioning on coffee and rage and the image of her mother in a hospital bed that Derek showed her.
The financial reports don't lie.
Sophie sees it immediately once she knows how to look. Ashford Holdings is bleeding money in places it shouldn't be. The company should be profitable. The company should be thriving. Instead it's surviving on the strength of its legacy and nothing else.
By the second week, Sophie has memorized the company's structure. She knows which divisions are profitable and which are rotting from the inside. She knows that James inherited the company at twenty-five and spent the first three years trying to prove himself to investors who already believed in him just because of his name.
Then something changed around three years ago.
The decisions became safer. The innovation stopped. The company started coasting.
Sophie knows the exact moment this happened.
It was right after she left.
She doesn't let herself think about that for very long. She pushes past it and keeps reading.
By the third week, Sophie finds the first real anomaly.
She's studying the expense reports when she sees it. A line item that doesn't make sense. A payment that shows up every month without a clear designation. One hundred fifty thousand dollars. The description says consulting fees but there's no consultant listed.
Sophie stares at that line for a long time.
She calls Jessica at 11pm.
"There's money leaving the company that shouldn't be," Sophie says. "It's consistent. Monthly. It's being hidden in the expense reports."
Jessica is at her apartment in thirty minutes.
They pull Chen into a video call at 11:47pm. Chen studies the payments for an hour, tracing them through different accounts, following the trail like he's reading a treasure map.
"The money is going to an individual," Chen finally says. His voice is quiet and focused. "Not a company. An individual. Someone inside the organization is receiving these payments."
Sophie's stomach drops.
"Who?" she asks.
It takes two more hours, but they find it.
Henry Morris. The CFO. The man James trusted to run his numbers and manage his money. Henry Morris has been receiving one hundred fifty thousand dollars a month for fourteen months.
"That's over two million dollars," Jessica whispers.
"From where?" Sophie asks.
Chen keeps digging. The payments come from multiple shell companies. The money is obscured and hidden but it's definitely going to Henry Morris. And based on the timing and the pattern, it started right after the market recovered. Right after Sophie left.
"He's stealing," Patricia says. The lawyer is direct. "He's embezzling from the company."
But Sophie doesn't think so. This is too organized. Too intentional. This isn't the work of someone desperate for money. This is the work of someone being paid for something specific.
"He's selling information," Sophie says quietly. "Or sabotaging something. He's being paid to do something to this company."
Jessica and Chen exchange a look.
"If we go to James with this," Jessica says carefully, "we give up any element of surprise. He'll fire Henry. He'll fix the problem. And then we lose our leverage."
Sophie stands up and walks away from the laptop. She goes to her window and looks out at the city. Somewhere out there, James is probably in his penthouse or his office. Somewhere out there, he's working late thinking he's failing. Thinking the company is struggling because he's not good enough.
But maybe the company is struggling because someone he trusts is destroying it from the inside.
"We don't go to James," Sophie finally says. "We find out what Henry is actually doing first. We find out who he's working for. Then we decide what to do with that information."
Over the next week, Sophie becomes obsessed with Henry Morris's movements.
She traces his calendar. She studies his email contacts. She watches him arrive at the office and leave at the end of the day. She learns that he takes lunch at the same restaurant every Tuesday. She learns that he looks tired all the time, like he's carrying something he never wanted to hold.
Then she finds something that makes her pause.
She's been pulling up articles about Ashford Holdings losing market share and she sees the timeline clearly now. The moment Henry started receiving payments is the moment the company started losing ground to competitors. Not coincidence. Cause and effect.
Which means Henry Morris isn't just stealing.
He's sabotaging the company systematically.
And James doesn't even know.
Sophie sits in her apartment at 3am on a Friday and reads through all of Henry's transactions and she understands something that makes her chest ache.
James thinks he's failing.
James thinks his company is struggling because he's not good enough. Because he doesn't have the vision. Because he inherited something and couldn't maintain it.
But it's not his fault at all.
Someone is deliberately breaking what he built.
Sophie closes her laptop and sits in the dark for a long time.
She thinks about going to Derek Sterling and telling him what she found. She thinks about how pleased he'd be that his sabotage is working. She thinks about how this information could become part of her leverage in taking over the company.
But instead, she thinks about James working eighty-hour weeks thinking he's the problem.
She thinks about the exhausted man in her coffee shop who ordered black coffee without looking at the person making it.
She thinks about him going home to an empty apartment and trying to figure out where he went wrong.
The next day, Sophie does something she hasn't done since the divorce.
She searches for James online without planning to.
She finds a photo from last night. He was at some charity event with a blonde woman in a red dress. The woman is laughing. James is staring at his plate like it holds answers.
Sophie recognizes the expression.
It's the expression of someone pretending to be present while actually being somewhere else entirely.
It's the expression of someone who's given up.
And Sophie realizes that Derek Sterling was right about one thing.
James never got over her.
She can see it in every photo. In the way he moves through his life like a ghost. In the way he dates women who look nothing like her but somehow everything like her. In the way he works until his brain is too tired to remember what he's lost.
Sophie closes the browser and makes a decision.
She's going to confront Henry Morris.
She's going to find out exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it. She's going to look him in the eye and ask him why he's destroying a man who trusted him.
And then she's going to decide if she's going to use this information to destroy James or if she's going to use it to save him.