THE MAFIA BOSS WAS JUST SEVEN DAYS AWAY FROM DIVORCING HIS WIFE—UNTIL ONE ACCIDENTAL KISS MADE THEM SWITCH BODIES AND EXPOSED EVERYTHING HE'D NEVER NOTICED!

The account was real. Raphael knew because he remembered creating it.

Five years earlier, after a flood destroyed several storage businesses along the river, he had instructed Gideon to establish a reserve for emergency repairs and displaced workers. The money came directly from his private holdings. Raphael had signed the original authorization during a trip to Detroit, sitting in the back of a car while rain struck the windows. He remembered being proud that he could pay for what the city could not.

Now the register showed that the reserve had sent money to Meridian Civic Logistics under descriptions such as community refrigeration support and temporary warehouse safety upgrades. Those payments could plausibly have financed the very scheme they were investigating.

“Did you know?” Josephine asked.

They were in the library again, beneath portraits of ancestors Raphael had never met. He looked at her wearing his face and thought of how many men would have loved to have a witness who looked like Raphael Baron answer the question for him. But Josephine had no access to his memories. She could not know the difference between what he'd approved and what had happened afterward.

“I authorized the reserve,” he said. “I didn't authorize these transfers. I don't know whether Gideon had authority to make them or whether someone fabricated the approval chain.”

She read the figures. “But you didn't review it.”

“No.”

“Then your money may have paid the people who falsified a safety report.”

“Yes.”

Raphael waited for anger. What appeared instead was grief. Josephine looked at the transactions as though they were a familiar wound. She had spent years fighting the idea that a good intention could excuse a careless result. Hearing Raphael admit it now meant she could no longer shelter him from that truth, even in her imagination.

“Gideon will use this against you,” she said.

“He should be able to use genuine evidence if it proves something. What he shouldn't be able to do is choose what it means before an investigation.”

“Do you understand that your name may be in the filings?”

“I do.”

“And that I won't lie for you?”

He met her gaze. “I wouldn't ask.”

Josephine shook her head, not because she disbelieved him but because the answer was something she had stopped expecting to hear.

At eight on Sunday morning, Mara assembled the relevant records in a borrowed conference room across from the courthouse. She had invited an independent forensic accountant, Theo Lin, who seemed entirely unimpressed by the Baron name. He wore a wrinkled jacket and asked for coffee with so much milk it turned the color of the wall.

Theo reviewed the reserve's original authorization. Raphael had approved a finite pool of funds for emergency repairs, with individual disbursements requiring dual review. Gideon's office later designated a replacement reviewer after the original controller retired. The replacement was an outside bookkeeper who worked for another company in Gideon's investment group.

“Is it illegal?” Raphael asked.

“It's suspicious,” Theo answered. “The question is whether the actual approval process met the rules and whether the payments purchased real services. That's what needs testing.”

He pointed to invoices describing portable refrigeration systems. The serial numbers repeated across four separate shipments, each billed as new. If the equipment existed, there should be matching purchase records, freight receipts, installation logs, and photographs.

“We can ask investigators to obtain those,” Mara said.

Josephine leaned over the table. “And the reserve's bank won't release the names of authorized approvers without process.”

“Correct. We shouldn't pretend otherwise.”

Raphael looked at the totals. He could pay back every missing dollar, but repayment would not answer whether the money had funded a bribe or reduced oversight. He finally understood why Mara refused to let him solve the matter with a check.

The emergency court conference began at ten. North Channel argued that its interim operation was necessary to protect city deliveries. Mara responded with the unresolved safety reports, the evidence of conflicting ownership, and the fire department's closure order. She asked for narrow relief: prevent any transfer of records, assets, or site control while the disputed certification was investigated, with a neutral operator maintaining essential services in safe facilities.

Josephine sat behind counsel in Raphael's body and listened as the judge questioned both sides. She knew every defect in the warehouse and could describe how one mislabeled report had multiplied through systems designed to rely on certification. Yet she was expected to remain silent because a lawyer was speaking for the corporation. The feeling was strangely familiar.

Raphael sat beside her. When the judge asked whether the company would consent to independent access to its records, Josephine stood and answered yes. Gideon's outside counsel objected from across the aisle, claiming that Raphael had not reviewed the implications. Josephine felt a flash of anger. She had reviewed the implications more carefully than anyone else in the room.

“We consent,” she repeated.

The judge ordered preservation of disputed records and restricted the interim operator from transferring or disposing of assets, pending further proceedings. It was not a final judgment about wrongdoing. It did not vindicate Josephine or convict Gideon. It did, however, keep the evidence from vanishing while the questions were asked.

Outside the courthouse, cameras waited. A reporter shouted about the payments from Raphael's reserve. Another asked whether Josephine was the target of a criminal investigation. The questions seemed arranged to make either answer sound guilty.

Josephine stood beside Raphael and spoke in his voice. “The funds came from a reserve I established. I am cooperating with an independent review. If my oversight failed, I will accept responsibility for that. I won't blame my wife for raising the warnings I ignored.”

Raphael heard the statement through her mouth and wished he had made it years earlier, when it might have prevented harm. The crowd surged, and a security guard moved toward Josephine's small body to guide her away. Raphael held up a hand.

“I can walk,” he said.

A woman reporter near the front looked directly at Josephine's face. “Mrs. Baron, do you still stand by your husband?”

Raphael had no right to answer for her heart. He looked toward Josephine, but she was already watching him. The reporter mistook his hesitation for guilt.

“I stand by the workers,” he said finally. “The documents need to be examined. That's more important than making a marriage look good for a camera.”

The answer made the evening news. Nobody in the studio could explain why the Barons suddenly sounded like people who had switched priorities, and the comments online split into camps. Some called them courageous. Others said the speeches were a rehearsed distraction. Raphael read three comments, felt his stomach tighten, and set the phone down. Josephine had lived for years with strangers deciding what kind of woman she must be. He could endure an afternoon of it.

At noon, Camille arrived at Mara's office with a lawyer and the phone she'd used to record Raphael. She wanted limited immunity for the material she had collected. Mara reminded everyone that immunity wasn't hers to promise. Camille looked older without the careful expression she'd worn at the gala.

“Gideon told me Josephine was selling information to Meridian,” she said. “He said I needed proof before Raphael was ruined.”

“What did you record?” Mara asked.

“Conversations. Mostly about the divorce. He asked me to make her discuss the clinic and the shipping schedule. When the recording didn't include a confession, his editor put pieces together.”

Raphael stared at her. He had thought Camille's betrayal would produce a satisfying burst of rage. Instead he remembered how pleased Josephine had once been when Camille accepted a dinner invitation, how she had bought a scarf because Camille admired the color, how she had sat beside the telephone waiting for a friend to call back.

“Why?” he asked quietly.

Camille looked at Josephine's face. “He was helping my brother with a loan. He said if I didn't cooperate, he'd send the debt to collections and make sure the family knew why.”

“That explains the pressure,” Mara said. “It doesn't excuse what you did.”

“I know.”

Camille provided the original unedited audio from her phone and the messages instructing her to collect statements. She identified the media contractor who assembled the gala video. Mara arranged for the materials to be preserved and provided to investigators with the relevant context. Camille left without being forgiven.

On the steps outside, Josephine stopped her. Raphael watched from a few feet away, careful not to insert himself into a friendship that had never belonged to him.

“You knew what the clinic meant to me,” Josephine said from Raphael's body.

Camille flinched at being addressed by the man she thought had been indifferent to his wife's work. “I thought Gideon was protecting him.”

“You could have asked her,” Josephine said. “You could have asked me.”

Camille whispered, “I'm sorry.”

Josephine did not respond. She let the words hang between them, not as punishment but as something Camille would have to carry without a quick absolution.

That evening, Gideon called Raphael's private number. Josephine answered from his body while Raphael sat beside her.

“Meet me alone,” Gideon said. “I have the original instructions your wife signed. If they become public, the clinic loses its donors and her father becomes part of the story.”

Josephine's face tightened. “My father is dead.”

“Yes,” Gideon said. “Dead people are wonderfully unable to contradict paperwork.”

Raphael felt cold all over.

“Where?” Josephine asked.

“The old terminal offices. Nine tomorrow morning. Bring no lawyers.”

She ended the call and turned to him.

“We aren't going alone,” Raphael said.

“I know.”

“Do you think he has anything real?”