“You okay?” she asked, glancing at me.
“I’m alive.” I stared out the window at the passing landscape—strip malls, pawn shops, and a Waffle House. Memories flooded back suddenly, like a dam breaking. I could almost hear the laughter of my co-workers, smell the coffee from the break room, feel the familiar ache of a long day’s work.
Before the Fall
That day was forever etched in my mind, clear as if it were yesterday. A typical Monday morning at Excel Partners. I was deep into the quarterly report when two men in dark suits walked into my office. Their expressions were serious, and I felt a chill creep down my spine.
“Naomi Harrove? We’re with financial crimes. We need to ask you some questions about wire transfers to Blue Spectrum Consulting.”
At first, I didn’t understand what they were talking about. The words bounced off me, heavy and foreign. They took me to a conference room and showed me documents with my signature on them—documents I had never seen before. Payment orders for huge sums. Eight hundred seventy-two thousand dollars. Contracts with a company I had never heard of.
“This is some kind of mistake,” I repeated over and over, my voice rising in desperation.
By evening, the mistake had turned into an absolute nightmare. They found a program for unauthorized transfers on my work computer. On my home computer, they discovered search queries about offshore accounts. Then, they uncovered a Cayman Islands account in my name, where part of the stolen money had been routed. My heart sank as I realized I was being framed.
When they brought me home with a search warrant, I looked to Alvin for support. But his expression was cold, bewildered. “Naomi, what have you done? How could you?”
His words cut through me, sharp and unforgiving. I didn’t understand then. It wasn’t until the preliminary hearing that everything began to unravel. I spotted Alvin whispering to the district attorney, and my heart sank further. And there was Tiana Mosley, a former dancer Alvin had once defended. We had laughed over dinners, shared drinks, but in that courthouse hallway, she looked at me with barely concealed triumph.
Everything became painfully clear when Alvin refused to hire me a good lawyer, citing a conflict of interest. Instead, I got an inexperienced public defender who didn’t even challenge the obviously fabricated evidence. I was sentenced to seven years for large-scale financial fraud while Alvin sat in the front row, holding Tiana’s hand.
