My family clapped while my father dragged me by my hair across a ballroom floor, completely unaware my old roommate was about to expose their $4.8M theft.

By noon, the battlefield shifted to the subterranean archives of the First Republic Bank on Congress Avenue.

Because Eleanor Vance’s original trust had been established through a private banking division before the institution was acquired in the late nineties, the original wet-ink documents were stored in the vault basement—untouched by digital sweeps.

Dalia, Marcus, and I sat in a private viewing room under the watchful eye of the bank’s chief compliance attorney, a nervous man named Arthur Pendelton who looked like he hadn't slept since Dalia's federal subpoena landed on his desk at seven AM.

"The four point eight million was moved via automated clearing house directly into an escrow account held by the Department of the Navy's financial settlement bureau," Pendelton explained, wiping sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. "We received the digital authorization from Miss Vance's encrypted portal account."

"My client never had an encrypted portal account," Dalia said sharply, not looking up from a leather-bound folder. "The IP address used to register that account originated from a residential router at forty-two Pinerove Lane. Richard Vance's home office."

"Be that as it may," Pendelton stammered, "the physical trust charter requires that any major distribution over one million dollars must be verified against the original signature card signed during the beneficiary’s majority induction."

"Which happened three years ago," I said, remembering the day.

I was twenty-two. I had just returned from the hospital after what my father called a "staircase accident"—two cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder. He had brought a notary to my bedside while I was delirious on hydrocodone, demanding I sign a signature confirmation card "for insurance purposes."

Marcus pulled a high-resolution spectral scanner from his bag and aimed it at the yellowed 2021 document Pendelton laid on the felt table.

The ultraviolet beam hummed over the black ink of my signature.

Marcus peered through a specialized magnifying loupe, then snorted in disgust. "Look at this, Dalia."

Dalia leaned in. I leaned in beside her.

"Tremors," Marcus pointed out, tracing the loop of the 'C' in *Coralene*. "Mechanical hesitations at the apex of the 'l' and 'n'. This isn't a medicated signature, Miss Vance. This is a robotic autopen trace using a digitized template from an old high school report card."

"They didn't even bother taking her real hand," Dalia said, her voice dropping into a tone of quiet fury. "They used an autopen machine. You can buy them for four hundred bucks online."

"Mr. Pendelton," Dalia said, turning her piercing gaze on the bank attorney. "Your compliance department processed a four-point-eight-million-dollar wire based on an autopen forgery from a residential IP address, bypassing two-factor authentication, thirty minutes before the international cutoff window. Tell me, how much did Richard Vance promise your regional vice president for expediting this?"

Pendelton went utterly white. "I... I have no personal knowledge of—"

"Save it for your deposition on Wednesday," Dalia snapped, snapping the folder shut. "Marcus, take high-res digital scans of every single page. If so much as a comma goes missing from this vault, I’m naming First Republic as a co-conspirator in a RICO complaint."

As we walked out into the bright Texas sunshine, my phone buzzed again.

It wasn't Eli this time.