MIA POV
The first page is financial records.
She knows what financial records look like. Her father kept the household accounts in a green ledger on the kitchen shelf, and she used to sit beside him on Sunday mornings while he went through it, columns of numbers that meant groceries and rent and the small careful life they built together. She learned to read a ledger at nine years old because he said a woman who understands money understands power and then he laughed like it was a small thing he was teaching her.
She is not laughing now.
The columns in front of her are not groceries. The numbers have too many zeroes. The dates run across eighteen months, starting three years before her father died, and the pattern is the same each time money moving in, money moving out, the same account number on the receiving end, over and over, regular as breathing.
Her father's name is at the top of every page.
Victor Emilio Cole. Account holder. Signatory.
