Chapter 11 Rose #3
My stomach turned. “What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean the money was received and then it disappeared from your operating account. No record of a transfer, no refund issued, no trace. Someone moved it and covered the trail.” Sandra paused. “Rose, this isn’t a bookkeeping error. Someone with access to your accounts is moving money.”
There were only two people with access to those accounts. Me and Denise.
I thought about Denise in the barn feed room, waving her hand. Processing. Their bank is slow. I’ve got a follow-up scheduled.
No. There had to be another explanation.
The happiness from this morning felt like it belonged to a different woman.
“How much are we talking about? Across all of it?”
“The three vendor overcharges total roughly fifteen thousand above what should have been paid. The Rousseau deposit is another eight. But this is only the last two months. If this pattern goes back further, the number could be much higher. I need you to pull six months of bank statements and cross-reference them against every invoice in your system.”
“I’ll do it now.”
I hung up and sat very still, staring at the screen.
Fifteen thousand dollars.
In a business where every dollar had a name and a job, where I budgeted feed costs down to the bag and negotiated vendor contracts line by line, fifteen thousand dollars had gone somewhere it shouldn’t have.
I opened the accounting software and started pulling records.
Graham found me two hours later.
I hadn’t left the office. Bank statements covered the desk in rows, printed, highlighted, cross-referenced against invoices I’d pulled from the filing cabinet. The laptop was open to the vendor payment history. A legal pad sat beside me, filling up with line items that refused to add up.
“I knocked twice,” Graham said from the doorway. “You didn’t hear me.”
I looked up. I must have looked worse than I thought, because his expression shifted from curious to concerned.
“What happened?”
“My accountant called.” I pushed a hand through my hair. “Someone’s been stealing from me.”
He came in and closed the door. Pulled the chair from the corner and sat beside the desk.
“Show me,” he said.
I laid it out. The vendor overcharges, the vanished deposit, what I’d been finding.
Graham was quiet for a beat too long.
“What?” I said.
He rubbed the back of his neck, the gesture he made when he was choosing his words carefully, which I’d learned meant the words mattered.
“Olivia found something,” he said. “After you mentioned the Ridgeline invoice, the numbers didn’t sit right with me, so I asked her to pull public filings.” He met my eyes. “Ridgeline Supply is registered through TKM Digital Solutions. And TKM Digital is registered to Taylor Marsh.”
I stared at him.
“Denise’s Taylor,” I said.
“Aye.”
The bank statements on my desk looked different now. Not like a puzzle I was solving but like a trap I’d been sitting inside for months.
“How long have you known this?” I asked, my eyes narrowing.
“Just found out a few hours ago. Honestly. I didn’t know how deep it went, and I didn’t want to come to you with half a picture and have it sound like—” He stopped himself.
“Like the man who lied about his identity was now accusing my best friend’s boyfriend of stealing from me.”
He held my gaze. “Aye. Exactly like that.”
I wanted to be angry at him for not telling me right away. Part of me was. But the part of me that had spent six years learning to read people knew he was right. If he’d come to me earlier with nothing but a theory, I would have thrown him out.
“Sandra needs me to flag anything that doesn’t match an invoice I personally approved, but I keep getting lost cross-referencing,” I said, pushing past it.
Graham picked up the legal pad. “I’ll help. Tell me what to write.”
We worked through it line by line. I’d read each statement, vendor name, date, amount, and check it against my invoice files.
When something matched, we moved on. When it didn’t, I’d call out the details and Graham would log them: company name, date, amount charged, what the original quote had been if one existed, and whether I’d authorized the payment.
The list grew.
By five o’clock, we had seventeen flagged transactions spanning last year.
Payments to companies with no verifiable operations.
Legitimate vendors with inflated charges, overages of two or three thousand dollars each, small enough to slip past a busy owner who trusted her partner to manage the details.
Service fees for maintenance contracts I’d never signed.
And every single one carried Taylor Marsh’s digital signature.
“How much?” I asked.
Graham looked at the totals. “Seventy-two thousand. Give or take.”
I stared at the number until it stopped looking like a number and started looking like a death sentence.
Seventy-two thousand dollars. Stolen from a business that ran on margins so thin I could feel them snap.
“Denise is off today,” I said, reaching for my phone. “But she needs to see this.”
Denise arrived twenty minutes later.
She came in the way she always came through doors. Brisk, purposeful, slightly out of breath. Jeans and a pullover, hair in a ponytail instead of its usual neat twist.
Her eyes went straight to Graham.
“Hey,” she said, then looked at me. “What’s going on?”
“Graham’s been helping me sort through the statements,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Sandra called this morning and I needed someone to help organize the paperwork.”
I felt my neck flush and willed it to stop. Denise was going to see it the same way Kaya had, the ease between us, the invisible thread connecting our bodies.
But she just nodded. “Okay. What’ve you got?”
I turned the laptop toward her and showed her the spreadsheet.
“Sandra flagged discrepancies in the quarterly reconciliation this morning,” I said. “Vendor payments that don’t match approved invoices. We’ve been going through six months of records.”
Denise’s eyes moved across the screen.
“Every transaction traces back to Taylor’s credentials,” I said. “His digital signature is on all of it.”
Denise’s face went rigid.
“What?” she whispered. “That’s not— Rose, that can’t be right.”
“It’s right. Sandra confirmed the pattern. And the companies he’s been paying, like TKM Digital, they’re shells, Denise. No real operations, no verifiable clients. Just business registrations filed in the last six months.”
Denise stood up. Paced to the window. Came back.
“That fucking son of a bitch,” she said, her voice cracking. “I brought him here. I vouched for him. I told you he was trustworthy and this whole time he’s been—” She broke off, pressing her hand over her mouth. Her eyes filled. “How much?”
“At least seventy thousand.”
Denise made a sound like she’d been hit. She sank back into the chair and covered her face.
“I’m so sorry,” she said through her fingers. “Rose, I’m so fucking sorry. I gave him access to everything because I trusted him and I—” Her voice broke. “I should have been checking his work. I should have been watching.”
My throat ached. This was my best friend. The woman who’d helped me build this business from nothing, who’d held me through every crisis.
She was crying in my office because the man she loved had stolen from me.
I moved to the chair beside her and put my hand on her back.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You didn’t know.”
Denise looked up, eyes red, mascara tracking down her cheeks. “What do we do?”
“Obviously, I’m going to fire Taylor. And I’m calling the sheriff in the morning.”
“Yes.” Denise nodded rapidly, wiping her face, straightening, shifting into the mode I’d seen a hundred times.
Crisis management. “Absolutely. Fire him and file a report. I’ll pull together everything I have on his access logs.
Every system he touched, every login, every timestamp.
We’ll build a case so tight he can’t breathe. ”
She reached across and grabbed my hands.
“I will fix this,” she said, looking me dead in the eyes. “Whatever it takes. I will help you get back every dollar he stole.”
I squeezed her hands and nodded.
She left an hour later with a list of tasks and the fierce energy of a woman on a mission.
Graham was quiet after Denise left.
We straightened up the office together, stacking statements, closing the laptop, putting the legal pad in the desk drawer. When we finished, he leaned against the filing cabinet and looked at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You have a face.”
“I always have a face.”
“You have a thinking face. You want to say something?”
He was quiet for a moment. “Do you believe her?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “She was devastated. You saw her.”
“I saw her.”
“She cried. She blamed herself. She immediately started figuring out how to fix it.”
“She did all of those things.”
His tone made me stop. “You don’t believe her.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” I crossed my arms. “Graham, Denise has been here almost since the beginning. My best friend. She has no reason—”
“I know.” He held up his hands. “You know her better than I do.” He stopped. Shook his head. “Forget I said anything.”
I studied him. He looked like a man swallowing glass.
“Okay,” I said quietly.
He pulled me into his arms and held me, and I let him, because the day had been long and terrible and he was solid and warm and he smelled like woodsmoke and clean skin and something I was starting to depend on.
“We’ll figure it out,” he murmured into my hair.
“Yeah,” I said. “We will.”
I fired Taylor the next morning.
I’d asked Denise to be there. She’d arrived early, a folder of access logs and system records clutched against her chest like armor. Graham leaned against the wall near the door, not part of the conversation, but present. I’d also asked him to stay. He hadn’t questioned it.
Taylor walked in expecting a meeting about the security system update he’d been working on. He saw the three of us and stopped in the doorway.
“Sit down,” I said.