My boss fired me on a Friday for expense fraud. $18,400 in fake client dinners, all billed under my login. I hadn't taken a dime. Greg Sullivan walked me into the small conference room at 3:40 p.m. Rachel from HR was already sitting there with a folder and the expression of someone who'd rehearsed. Nobody offered me water. Nobody asked me a single question. "We've reviewed the card activity," Greg said. "It's pretty clear-cut." I've been a senior financial analyst at Halvorsen Logistics for nine years. I've never expensed a parking ticket I couldn't justify. I said so. Rachel slid the folder across the table anyway. Security walked me to my desk. I put my mug, my plant, and a framed photo of my mom in a banker's box while two coworkers pretended to stare at their monitors. I'd almost made it to the elevator when I remembered something. Three weeks earlier, I'd flagged a vendor in our quarterly audit. A catering company called Brightline Hospitality had been paid $31,000 over six months with no purchase orders attached. When I brought it to Greg, he smiled and said, "Hold off on that one. I'll handle it." I'm not proud of this, but I'd saved a copy of the audit file to my phone before I closed the laptop. Old habit. My first manager taught me never to trust a verbal "I'll handle it." That night, at my kitchen table, I laid the audit next to the fraud report they'd given me. Every "client dinner" had been booked on a day I was on PTO. Twelve of them. One was at a steakhouse in Scottsdale, Arizona. I've never been to Arizona.