Chapter 3 - The Audit Trail
The kitchen doors swung shut behind her, cutting off the murmur of polite conversation and the dull clatter of silver against china. The room was warm, smelling of butter and roasted herbs, completely isolated from the cruel theater happening twenty feet away.
Simone set the empty plate down on the stainless steel prep counter with a soft, deliberate clink. Her hands didn't shake. Her breathing remained slow and rhythmic, the muscle memory of high-pressure service keeping her anchored to reality. But beneath that exterior calm, a furnace was roaring.
She walked over to the small wooden desk tucked into the corner of the pantry—a space Patricia had once dismissed as "where Simone does her little receipts." Beside the desk sat her leather-bound portfolio and her canvas tote bag, zipped shut.
Thirty-seven minutes earlier, when Douglas had left his phone on the breakfast counter while running to the garage to fetch extra folding chairs, Simone hadn't just seen the preview banner from V. Sterling. She had picked up the device. Because Douglas was notoriously arrogant about his digital security—believing that anyone bearing the Reeves last name was inherently immune to consequence—his phone had unlocked instantly via face recognition as she picked it up to move it out of the way of a leaking stockpot.
What she found in those thirty seconds had confirmed every paranoid whisper her intuition had been feeding her for months.
There were text threads stretching back nine months. Apartment leases in downtown Stamford signed under an LLC managed by a holding company. Receipts for luxury jewelry purchased from a boutique on Madison Avenue using a credit card linked to accounts Simone hadn't seen in over a year. And, most importantly, bank transfer confirmations totaling nearly four hundred thousand dollars—transferred directly from the joint savings account she and Douglas had painstakingly built during the early years of her catering business, funds meant to expand Whitfield & Table into its first brick-and-mortar flagship location.
Douglas hadn't just been cheating on her. He had been systematically liquidating her future to fund his double life with a woman who likely had no idea that the home-cooked meals she enjoyed were subsidized by a wife working fourteen-hour days in a professional kitchen.
And then there was the second discovery—one that Douglas and his father thought they had buried beneath layers of corporate bureaucracy.
Two weeks ago, while collecting financial statements from the home office printer for her accountant, a stray document had printed from the main server: an internal audit report from North Atlantic Logistics. It detailed a series of suspicious asset transfers, offshore shell companies, and fraudulent freight invoicing schemes designed to siphon millions out of the company’s expansion fund before an upcoming federal Department of Transportation compliance audit. At the center of those signatures, authorizing every irregular wire, was Richard Reeves Sr.—and, as a junior signatory whose name had been quietly inserted to bind him to the liability, Douglas Reeves.
They had treated her like hired help because they assumed she was too exhausted, too small-town, and too domestic to look up from her mixing bowls long enough to read a balance sheet. They thought her world began and ended at the edge of a copper saucepan.
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Simone reached into her canvas tote, pulled out a heavy manila folder secured with a red elastic band, and slipped it beneath the false bottom of her leather case. Then she reached for her phone, opened an encrypted messaging app, and tapped out a single sentence to a contact saved under the name Marcus Vance, Esq.:
The turkey is carved. Come and get the plates.
