The ballroom of the Grandview Hotel smelled of expensive white roses, melting wax, and cloying vanilla buttercream. Two hundred guests—wealthy elites, senior executives from Bellweather Development, and smiling relatives who had known me since I was a child—were still chuckling.

With Mason behind bars awaiting trial, the immediate fallout required surgical precision. Abigail (Claire) spent the next week locked in her office alongside Marcus Vance, auditing every subsidiary, real property holding, and vendor contract that Mason had touched during his three-year tenure as Vice President of Acquisitions. They uncovered a sprawling web of dummy corporations, kickback schemes with competing contractors, and falsified safety inspection reports on three major residential developments across upstate New York. Rather than sweeping the scandals under the rug to protect the company's stock price, Claire insisted on full transparency, voluntarily reporting the safety infractions to municipal inspectors and initiating emergency retrofitting projects at Bellweather’s own expense. This radical display of corporate integrity shocked Wall Street, sending a powerful signal that the company had severed its ties with corruption entirely.