The twenty-ninth strike landed just as my daughter began singing Happy Birthday to herself.

The seventh floor of the Whitcomb-Hallowell tower in downtown Boston smelled of old paper, high-end floor wax, and roasting coffee beans from the pantry down the hall.

When I stepped out of the private elevator at nine in the morning, the entire floor went quiet.

The analysts and associates who had been clustered around the glass-walled conference room stopped talking mid-sentence. Several of them—older men who had been senior vice presidents when I was still finishing my master’s thesis—looked up, blinked once, and then slowly stood up from their chairs.

Arthur Vance—not the competitor, but one of our senior partners who had retired two years ago and then come back as an advisor—was standing by the water cooler. He dropped his paper cup.

“Maddie,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “We heard... well, we heard the Hartford branch was being restructured, but nobody said anything about—”

“Good morning, Arthur,” I said, walking past him toward the corner office at the end of the long mahogany-paneled hallway. My heels—black leather, sensible, three inches lower than the ones Caleb liked me to wear—made a solid, crisp sound against the Italian tile. “Has anyone checked the municipal bond yields for the New England portfolio this morning?”

“The... the entire desk was cleared out by the receivers at six o’clock this morning, Maddie,” Arthur said, following me down the hall at a trot. “The new accounts manager from New York is supposed to arrive by noon, but—”

“There’s no new manager,” I said, turning the brass handle of the corner office door.

The door opened smoothly, without a sound.

Inside, the room was exactly as I had left it on a Tuesday afternoon in June 2020, just before I let Caleb convince me that “raising a family in the country” meant giving up everything I had built.

The three computer monitors sat on the walnut desk, their screens dark. The framed copy of my Wharton diploma hung on the wall between two floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over Boston Harbor through a veil of falling snow. On the corner of the blotter was the blue ceramic coffee mug I thought I’d lost during the move to Connecticut, with a dried-up yellow Post-it note stuck to the side: “Check the margin requirements on the Burlington Northern issue before three PM.”

I walked over to the desk, pulled off my wool coat, and laid it across the back of the leather chair.

My shoulders still ached—a dull, persistent throb where the leather strap had bitten through my blouse two nights ago—but as I sat down and pressed the power button on the primary terminal, the pain seemed to recede behind a wall of cold, clean focus.

“Arthur?” I said without looking up.

“Yes, Maddie?”

“Call the legal department. Tell them I want the complete dossier on every corporate entity registered by Caleb Harlan and his associates in the state of Connecticut over the past three years.”

“Right away.”

“And Arthur?”

“Maddie?”

“Tell them we’re opening a short position on Harlan & Sons stock. All of it. Every single share that’s left on the open market.”