The letter was official and final and arrived on a Wednesday morning two weeks before the wedding.
Aria read it at her desk in the consultancy office — the north side building, the one with William Wolfe’s key, the one that had her name above the door now in clean simple letters: COLE FINANCIAL CONSULTING. She had put the sign up herself. That had felt important.
The Meridian inquiry had concluded. Marcus Walsh had pleaded to three counts of financial fraud and received a sentence that his lawyers had negotiated down from what the evidence supported but which was nonetheless real and consequential. The defrauded clients — the people whose money had been taken fifteen years ago through the shell transactions that Walsh’s father had orchestrated and that Frank and Paul Garrett and others h
