Yardley Rowe was not somewhere the money passed through on its way to Ellis and Ondine. Yardley Rowe was where Ellis and Ondine belonged.
And the forensic accountant Ines had used in the September had already found something that neither of us had understood at the time: the three companies that took my grandmother’s sixty-one thousand had also taken, between 2021 and 2025, forty-one million in what were described as investor subscriptions.
From a hundred and nine people.
Sixty of whom, it turned out, were on that wedding guest list.
What I actually did at
the wedding.
Everybody wants this to be a scene. It was not a scene.
I went to Thornhallow House on the fourteenth of November with my daughter, five weeks old, in a sling. I wore a green dress that did not fit me. I was on table eleven, which is what he thought of me, and which I have been grateful for ever since, because table eleven is by the door.
