Tuesday at 7:00, Trevor was on my television.
The morning show sat him on a stool between a chili recipe and the weather.
He held a First Frost box on his knee.
Kraft board, frost-white band.
Three amber jars inside.
I drew that jar on a napkin in 2018.
Trevor turned the box so the logo faced the camera.
He's good at that.
"So what's the secret?" the anchor asked.
"Honestly?" Trevor said.
"Great brand, great team."
"At this point, it's a company that runs itself."
The anchor said that sounded like a dream.
Trevor said it was.
He didn't say my name once.
He said "team" eleven times.
I counted.
Then the weather came on.
Rain Friday, clearing by noon.
At 3:15, Tasha started texting.
Royce is here.
He brought champagne. Real champagne. In the warehouse.
He told everybody he wired 400k today.
"On the strength of the platform."
I read that one twice.
The platform was on my kitchen table, plugged into the wall.
It had a label that said not to unplug it.
Trevor's toasting with a coffee mug.
A minute later, another.
Royce on the dock just now, on the phone: "Hearthline needs one-eighty by Friday close."
No idea what Hearthline is.
Neither did I.
I wrote it on the back of an envelope and stuck it to the fridge.
Wednesday at 9:00, Lantern Row held an all-hands.
I wasn't invited.
Tasha sent it to me from the back row, one line at a time.
Colby's presenting.
He found your ops runbook in the shared Drive. The 2021 one.
It's on the big screen.
Then a photo of the big screen.
Registrar: Jo's personal account.
Then the store's users page.
Store owner: Joanna Varga
Then the payout settings, zoomed until the pixels showed.
Payouts to: J. Varga ••4417
I wrote that runbook so nobody would be stuck if I got hit by a bus.
They'd found the bus.
Colby looks like he wants to go home.
Trevor's up now.
He says you routed the company's money through your personal account for six years.
He said "skimmed."
He said legal's handling it.
Somebody asked if paychecks are okay.
He said "no thanks to Jo."
People are looking at me because I went to your house.
I'd trained six of those nine people on the label printer.
Now they'd watched my account number go up on a screen.
The money went through ••4417 every week.
Every Monday it went back out.
To ••7730.
To him.
Trevor had seen where the payouts landed.
He'd never asked where they went next.
At 10:00, the countdown email went out.
I still got it.
I'd signed myself up in 2018 to test the form.
FIRST FROST · 2 DAYS · Noon Friday, live
It went to 41,000 people.
Every button in it pointed at my domain.
Forty-one thousand people, one domain, one owner field.
At 11:00, I opened the ThinkPad on the kitchen table.
The credit union exports transfers by date range.
March 2, 2020, to November 24, 2025.
Then Shopify's payout report, same dates.
I lined them up in one spreadsheet.
Each Monday's payout into ••4417 on the left.
Each matching credit into ••7730 on the right.
Three hundred rows.
At the bottom, one cell.
Unreconciled difference: $0.00
Not a cent had stayed in ••4417.
I exported it to a PDF.
sweeps_2020-2025.pdf
I didn't send it.
Not to Trevor, who could read a bank statement when he wanted to.
Not to the team.
A spreadsheet doesn't beat a man with a clicker.
I saved it in three places and closed the file.
At 11:40, Wendell called.
"Your partner rang again," he said.
"He said he'd find a new glass guy."
"Did he?"
"He called a fella in Ohio."
"Fella called me."
I waited.
Wendell doesn't call to tell stories.
"PO's in your name, 2,400 vessels, $8,160."
"They sit in Dalton till you say."
"I can't say yet," I said.
"Didn't ask you to."
"Glass keeps."
He hung up before I could thank him.
Twenty-four hundred jars sat on pallets in Georgia, held on a name.
The rest of the day I did nothing useful.
I didn't post.
I didn't answer the two numbers I didn't know.
I raked the last of the leaves in the dark.
On the store, the countdown ticked toward Friday.
Orders for other candles kept landing in ••4417.
Next Monday they'd go back out again.
At 9:04 PM, my phone lit up on the counter.
Tasha.
She'd sat through the all-hands.
She'd watched me leave a badge and take a laptop.
She'd seen ••4417 on a screen the size of a door.
She'd had all day to think about it.
Jo, did you take the money?