Chapter 2
NORAH WINSLOW
The office was too quiet at night. During the day, Summit Capital’s DC floor pulsed with ambition. Heels clicked on polished stone. Someone was always laughing too loudly at some joke from a fund-manager.
But after dark, the glass walls turned into mirrors, reflecting her own face back from every angle. The soundscape narrowed to the scratch of her pen and the melodic dissonance of the binaural beats she turned on to help her focus.
Norah Winslow didn’t mind the quiet. The solitude suited her.
In the hush, the numbers stopped competing with the noise.
They lined up cleanly in her head, neat columns stacking themselves into order, the way they always had.
The distractions of the day finally faded, and she could just sink into the reassuring flow of her numbers.
Her desk was neat and orderly with just a few personal touches.
She had a white ceramic mug with a hairline crack in the handle—Summit-branded swag with an old version of the logo she refused to toss and used as a pencil holder.
Beside it, a single framed photo of a lake at dusk, and a small, crocheted mouse toy resting near the stapler.
The last one only because her cat, Cleo, had dropped it in her tote last week and she hadn’t had the heart to evict it.
Or the brain space to remember to take it back home.
She tugged a Post-It free and jotted a note to order new toys for Cleo in her precise block handwriting.
A thick stack of files sat to her left, each stamped NorthBridge Energy Portfolio.
She’d been combing through the accounts for weeks, reconciling projections against actual earnings, cash flow against liabilities, the pretty slide deck claims against what lived in the raw ledgers.
It was a run-of-the-mill due diligence analysis for their venture capital division.
Most analysts would skim the summaries, see nothing alarming, and call it a day.
But Norah didn’t skim.
A cleaning crew rattled a cart somewhere down the corridor, the faint smell of lemon polish threading under her door.
Norah’s office was near the corner, with a view that caught a sliver of the Potomac and the glow of the Washington Monument.
When she’d first moved into this office, she’d stood at the window for a long time, not looking at the monuments but her reflection—searching for a trace of the girl who’d left for college determined to outrun small town expectations.
Her phone buzzed across the desk, shattering her rhythm. She glanced at the screen, lips tightening.
With reluctance, she swiped to answer. “Hi, Mom.”
“Finally.” Her mother’s voice carried the same weary exasperation it always did. “I wasn’t sure you were ever going to pick up.”
“I’ve been busy. It’s closing week for an acquisition.”
“You’re always busy.” A pause. Then, with that pointed sweetness that made Norah brace, “I ran into someone at the club on Saturday.”
Norah froze, pen hovering above the margin of her worksheet. Her pulse tapped out of rhythm, an old reflex she despised. “Did you?”
“Mrs. Kelley. She said she talked to you last month. Such a lovely woman, always so gracious.”
Norah pressed her lips together. “I called to RSVP to Julie’s wedding, Mom. She asked how I was doing. That’s all.”
Her mother gave a hum of disbelief. “She said you didn’t even ask about Marshall. Honestly, Norah, after everything—”
“Mom.” Norah pinched the bridge of her nose, cutting her off. “I’m not talking about this. Not now.”
“Not ever, you mean.” The sigh came heavy, disapproving.
Her throat tightened, but she swallowed it down the way she always did. “I have to go.”
“Of course you do. I assume you are coming to the wedding, then?”
“Yes, I’ll be there.” Julie Kelley was her best friend from high school. And of course, the younger sister of her ex-boyfriend. “I’ll talk to you later, Mom.”
The wedding would be the first time she had seen Marshall in fifteen years. Ever since he’d left her to join the Army, and she’d insisted he take his promise ring with him.
Norah ended the call before the guilt could dig deeper.
She set the phone face-down, resisting the urge to shove it in a drawer.
Her gaze drifted to the glass wall opposite her desk.
The reflection that stared back was all straight dark hair, pinned back neatly, blazer fitted just so, posture taut.
The picture of predictability. She clung to it like armor.
She looked past her reflection, watching headlights thread along the bridge like patient fireflies.
DC after dark always felt a little unreal—buildings lit like stacked aquariums, people moving purposefully with takeout bags and briefcases, everything humming with the assumption that if you worked just a little harder, you could make something permanent.
If she left now, she could stop at the Thai place two blocks from her apartment—green curry, extra spicy, enough for leftovers.
Or she could be sensible, cook the salmon she’d bought last night and pretend she didn’t resent cooking for one.
Either way, Cleo would be waiting. Her long-haired tortie, with more attitude than affection, sprawled across the couch like she paid the rent herself.
Her apartment was the opposite of her office.
The space was flooded with warm lamplight and decorated with linen curtains and a vintage rug she’d haggled for at an estate sale.
There were a ridiculous number of cookbooks on the shelf—aspirational evidence of nights she swore she’d start inviting people over again.
Mostly-unread novels were stacked on the end table like a to-be-lived life.
She absently touched the crocheted mouse near her stapler, then pulled her attention back to the screen. Back to the numbers. Just a little more to do.
She ran her analysis, feeding the NorthBridge Energy accounts into a macro she’d built years ago, more habit than anything else.
The macro—Winslow_QC_v7.xlsm—was boringly named and obsessively maintained, a suite of sanity checks that had saved her embarrassment more than once.
It cross-checked period-over-period variances, flagged odd rounding behaviors, ran supplemental ratio tests she’d coded on a bored Sunday afternoon while flipping through her college textbooks for a refresher.
She waited, tapping her pen against the desk. The cleaning crew’s cart rattled closer. A vacuum whined. Someone laughed softly in Spanish and then fell silent again.
She clicked through the screens as the analyses were presented one after the other.
Her pen stilled between taps.
This curve was wrong.
She blinked and leaned closer. The first-digit histogram sat on the right side of the monitor screaming at her. It showed a jagged skyline where there should have been a smooth descent. Too many nines. Not enough ones. The distribution slanted off course.
That couldn’t be right. She frowned and worried her lip between her teeth.
Maybe she’d pointed the macro at the wrong sheet. She checked the range. Correct. She widened the range to include an additional ledger. The bars shivered and settled—still wrong.
Most people had never heard of Benford’s Law, and even Norah rarely used it. The basic idea was that in natural data, ones appear as the first digit most often, nines least. It was a fingerprint of honesty. NorthBridge’s numbers didn’t follow the law.
She flipped to a clean tab and ran a control, selecting an unrelated dataset from a different client that she knew was clean. The familiar gentle slope appeared, textbook perfect. Then she switched back to NorthBridge.
Jagged again.
Her mouth went dry. She rolled her chair back an inch and then forward again, restless. Explanations queued up like polite guests. Maybe a seasonal issue skewed purchasing, maybe a merger artifact created an artificial lump, maybe . . .
She ran an additional test—first two-digit Benford—just to punish the hypothesis. Within the second-digit distribution, the anomaly persisted, lean where it should’ve been generous, crowded where it should’ve been sparse.
This wasn’t sloppy bookkeeping. No harmless data quirk. Someone had forced the digits. They’d bent them and hammered them into place where they didn’t belong. Hidden well enough most analysts wouldn’t look twice.
But she had.
Norah glanced at the time in the corner of her screen after her additional analysis.
9:47 p.m. She imagined the Thai place’s door chime and the blast of basil and chili heat when it opened.
She thought about calling it a night. She’d flagged the anomaly, that was enough. That was her job, after all.
Her hand moved before she’d fully decided, clicking twice. She rose, chair sliding soundlessly back, and crossed to the printer against the wall. The low machine hummed and then spat a page into the tray with a mechanical sigh.
She folded it in half, then in half again, careful and precise, as if the act of neatness could make the contents less volatile.
She slid the paper into the back of her notebook, between a blank page and a receipt for dry cleaning.
This was a secret she wasn’t ready to share.
Why would she raise any alarms? It was probably nothing.
There was no reason to think NorthBridge wasn’t clean.
Back at her desk, she reran the analysis, because thoroughness was her middle name.
Same result. She split the NorthBridge data into subledgers—packaging, transport, maintenance, real estate—and ran the tests separately.
Packaging looked close to normal. Transport didn’t.
Real estate was the loudest offender, its digits marching in a way that made her skin prickle.