Yvonne knew: Grant Harmon had approached her firm with a legitimate-seeming engagement eighteen months ago. The contract was real, the deliverables were real, and the fees were real. But three months in, he was requesting that certain findings be reported differently—not falsified exactly, but framed in ways the data didn’t quite support.
She had pushed back. He had charmed her past it, and then, somewhere in the pushing and charming, something personal had begun. She wasn’t proud of it. She said this, looking directly at me, which I appreciated. “I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she said. “I just want you to know I’m not a person who does this. Except that I did.”