1. Emma #2
He opened his mouth. A voice carried down the hall from the ballroom—not his name, as far as she could tell, but close enough to a summons that his whole body angled toward it, attention snapped tight like a leash had tugged.
When he looked back at her, his face had shuttered closed, unreadable and remote, a man remembering he had somewhere to be.
“Excuse me.” And he was gone, cutting back down the hall toward the ballroom with a purpose sharp enough that anyone in his path would have stepped aside without registering they’d done it.
Emma stood very still, folders clutched to her chest, staring at the space where a very large, very immediate problem had been standing two seconds ago.
Her heart hadn’t caught up to the rest of the space yet.
It was still somewhere around her throat, pounding like she’d sprinted a flight of stairs instead of getting caught by a very large, very attractive stranger.
Professional composure had officially left the building. Get his name. Chase him down. Get. His. Name.
She did not chase him down. She turned around, marched back to her office, and spent the next twenty minutes furious at herself for wanting to—stamping the entire encounter professional hazard, do not repeat and immediately failing to stop thinking about his forearms even once.
The records office sat behind the ballroom’s back hallway—fluorescent-lit, filing cabinets, a server tower humming to itself, the kind of room built for work instead of performance.
Emma spread the new files across a folding table and dug back in, grateful for the quiet and the excuse to stop replaying the ghost of a hand on her elbow.
The animal rescue gap. The elder-care gap. She pulled a third ledger—a women’s shelter, one of Gerri’s oldest programs—and ran the same check.
It matched.
Her pen stopped. She sat back, and the fluorescent hum seemed to get louder in the silence where her focus narrowed to a pinpoint.
Three unrelated charities. Three boards.
Three accounting firms filing three sets of paperwork with three regulators who’d never think to compare notes.
And underneath all of it, the same fraction bleeding out of every account, over and over, small enough to survive a hundred audits and consistent enough that it could not be an accident. Not by any math Emma trusted.
She pulled a fourth ledger. A fifth. The pattern held.
The chill that walked down her spine had nothing to do with the air conditioning. Somebody built this on purpose. Built it to stay invisible. And they’re good. Frighteningly good.
She allowed herself exactly one full-body shudder, the kind she usually reserved for expired yogurt and men who called her “sweetheart” in depositions, and got back to work.
She didn’t hear the door until Gerri was already leaning in the frame, watching her work with a look Emma hadn’t seen all night—stripped of the champagne-bright performance from the ballroom, sharp and quiet underneath it.
Arms crossed, studying Emma with the focus of a woman deciding exactly how much of the truth she was about to hear.
“You found it.”
“I found a pattern. I don’t know what it means yet.”
“You will.” Gerri crossed the room and looked down at the spread of files, unbothered by numbers that would send most donors running for a lawyer.
“I’ve had six accountants through my books this year, Ms. Burke.
Every one told me my paperwork was in excellent order.
All six are now uninvited to next year’s gala, retroactively, for the crime of being wrong. ”
“Your paperwork is in excellent order. That’s what makes it work.” Emma tapped the matching entries, one charity to the next. “Whoever’s doing this understands nonprofit accounting well enough to hide inside it. This isn’t sloppy. It’s surgical.”
Recognition settled over Gerri’s face—not shock, Emma noted out of habit, but the look of a woman confirming a suspicion she’d been sitting on for a while and had finally found someone sharp enough to hand it to.
“How many charities do you think it touches?”
“I won’t know until I look at all of them.”
“Then look at all of them.” Gerri said it the way other people ordered a second round of drinks, though nothing in her eyes was that casual. “Name your rate and triple it. Clear your schedule. I want to know how deep this runs, and I want to know before whoever’s doing it realizes anyone noticed.”
Every professional instinct told her to ask for terms in writing, name a number, negotiate the fine print, walk in with her eyes fully open instead of her curiosity three steps ahead of her judgment.
She ignored all of it and looked at the women’s shelter ledger—careful books, bled slowly one invisible fraction at a time by somebody who’d never have to look those residents in the eye—and the calm, organized rage that had built her entire career snapped fully on.
Injustice never made her raise her voice. It made her open a new spreadsheet.
“I’ll need access to every charity in your network. Full financial history, board records, vendor contracts. And nobody outside this room finds out I’m looking.”
“Done.” Gerri’s smile became sharp at the edges, pleased in a way that suggested Emma had passed a test without knowing one had been handed out. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to say yes to that.”
Emma stacked the files, already mapping out the next month in her head—late nights, cross-referenced spreadsheets, the quiet satisfaction of watching a hidden scheme become visible one entry at a time.
It didn’t occur to her yet to wonder why a woman with Gerri Wilder’s money hadn’t simply hired a real firm with a marble lobby and a dozen names on the letterhead.
That question would show up later, uninvited, at a much worse time.
Gerri watched her gather everything, clearly pleased with what she’d come for, and turned for the door, one hand lingering on the frame as she glanced back.
“Eat. Sleep occasionally. Don’t die before you’re useful to me.” She said it like a blessing, which, from Gerri, it more or less was. Then, mostly to herself, crossing an old and very patient item off a very long list, “Now. I need my wolf.”
She was gone before Emma could ask what that meant.
Emma left the Wilder Hope Foundation a little after midnight, arms full of files.
The night air hit differently after hours of being couped up inside—sharp, almost bracing—and for half a block the back of her neck prickled with the stubborn, useless certainty that someone was watching her walk to the corner.
She glanced back. Empty sidewalk. Parked cars. A cab idling at the light. Nothing.
She blamed it on adrenaline and too little sleep, flagged the cab down anyway because arguing with her own nerves at midnight was a fight not worth winning, and spent the ride composing an audit schedule in her head instead of thinking about a stranger’s hands.
She thought about them anyway. The entire ride home.
Somewhere around Fifty-Seventh Street she gave up pretending otherwise, informed her own reflection in the cab window that she had a fraud ring to catch and no time for a man whose name she didn’t even know, and immediately lost that argument too.
A flash of movement snagged the edge of her vision—a shape in the shadow of a delivery awning across the street, phone raised, angled at the building behind her. Maybe at her. Gone before she could get a second look, swallowed by the corner and the dark.
She twisted around in her seat for a better angle and found nothing but an empty sidewalk and one deeply indifferent pigeon.
Party paranoia, she decided, tucked neatly alongside the champagne headache she didn’t remember earning and the warmth still humming faintly behind her ribs.
She had bigger problems tonight. She hadn’t met all of them yet.