Until a woman named Paige Delaney walked up her porch steps answering a help-wanted ad.
She knew who I was before she ever asked my name.
The ad, the job, the chicken soup, the question — Cora Winslow hired me on purpose. Not out of charity. Out of a thirty-year itch to finally prove the thing that had bothered her about those numbers.
"I didn't hire a housekeeper," she admitted later. "I hired the one person who might still have the receipts."
Chapter 3: Lies Hidden in Numbers
Howard Payne, the investigator whose name Cora pressed into my hand, turned out to be her old protégé.
And the documents I'd hidden before my arrest — copies of the real books, stuffed in a sealed envelope taped behind a drawer in a storage unit I'd paid three years of fees on from prison, twelve dollars at a time — turned out to be the thread that unraveled everything.
