Chapter 64: What Martin Knew
The examiners took three weeks, and Martin's firm gave them the good conference room, which told me they understood exactly what this was.
Owen sat in on everything.
Not as my lawyer. As my witness, because I wanted someone in that room who would remember what was said when people later claimed otherwise.
He reported in the evenings, over my kitchen table, in the flat voice he saved for bad news.
It is not Grant, he said in the first week.
That is the problem. I keep waiting for it to be Grant.
The report landed on my desk on a Monday. Four hundred pages.
I read all of them, because four hundred pages is what a firm's character looks like when it thinks no one is reading.
Grant's overbilling had not been one man's greed.
It was a system.
The escalators were built into the engagement letters themselves.
The review steps that should have caught them had been routed, year after year, to the same two partners, both of whom owed their books of business to the trust's work.
The examiners flagged one hundred and twelve matters.
Some were old enough to have attended my wedding.
One was dated the week of the wedding itself.
Grant had billed the trust seven hours on the morning of our rehearsal dinner. Strategy review, the entry said.
I remembered that morning. He had been on the golf course.
Grant had been the signature. But signatures need stationery, and the stationery had been printed long before him.
He had not built the machine.
He had only been its proudest operator, the man who ran it loudest and called it rainmaking.
Rainmaking. As if the rain had not been falling, patiently, for thirty years before he arrived with a bucket.
I knew both of the partners in the routing chain.
Their wives had sent us Christmas cards. One of them had danced with me at the firm's spring dinner and told me my husband was the future of the place.
I wondered, reading their names, whether the future of the place had known he was dancing too.
I brought Martin the summary myself. No ambush.
Men confess better sitting down, told the numbers first.
He read the twenty pages without once touching his water glass.
Ninety days, I said. Restitution on the flagged matters. A new fee structure. Outside oversight of every trust engagement.
And the two partners off our account, permanently.
And if I say those terms are fatal to this firm?
Then I will have learned what your firm was made of, I said.
It was not a threat. That was why he flinched.
He looked at me for a long time, and I watched him do the arithmetic senior partners do.
Reputation against revenue. The math they believe no one else can see.
You sound like Victor, he said finally.
No, I said. Victor forgave this the first time. I am the second time.
Then he said the thing he had actually asked this meeting for, and it was not about fees.
There is something else, Nora. Before you decide about us. You should hear it from me.
I waited.
I knew about Grant and Sabrina.
The room did not change. I made sure I did not change.
Two years. Maybe more. He was careless, and I was…
He stopped, and started again, cleaner.
I told myself it was a private matter. I told myself it was not the firm's business.
What I never told myself was that your family's contracts paid for a third of this floor, and a divorce could put all of that in play.
He set the summary down between us as if surrendering a weapon.
I decided not to see it, he said.
Now you have to decide what that is worth.