I drove an aging sedan he jokingly referred to as my humility car.
When I asked about the company books, he would wave the question away with a smile and say, “You worry too much. Leave the real risk-taking to people built for it.”
What he never realized was that numbers had always been my language, and even after years away from full-time work, I could still hear trouble before I saw it.
The Folder That Reopened My Eyes
The first real fracture in his carefully staged empire appeared three years before the divorce, on a wet Thursday evening when Eli needed his passport for a school trip and Brandon, for once, had forgotten to lock his office drawer.
I found the passport, but when I pulled it free, a thick folder slid out and spilled open across the desk, and the first page I saw was not a routine statement or tax summary but a final demand notice from a commercial lender.
The amount overdue was so large that for a moment my brain refused to process it cleanly.
More than three hundred thousand dollars past due.
Multiple deadlines.
Default warnings.
Potential legal action.
