My firm grew—not despite the attack, but partly because of the way we handled it. There is a strange benefit to surviving a targeted assault with your clients, systems, and discipline intact. People notice. Companies began hiring us not just for audits, but for crisis design, fraud prevention, and internal sabotage detection. We were no longer simply investigators. We had become the people institutions hired when they wanted blind spots exposed before someone else monetized them.
Marcus eventually joined my firm full-time as Chief Financial Officer.
Of course people gossiped. They always do when a man and woman survive a war together and remain standing side by side. We let them. What existed between us was rarer than romance and more durable than gossip: trust formed under pressure. He had seen the inside of my anger and not feared it. I had seen the inside of his grief and not mistaken it for weakness. We sharpened each other. Most days, that was more than enough.