For a second I genuinely thought he was teasing me, the way he sometimes did when he wanted to see if I was paying attention. His hands were still wrapped around the handles of the carving fork, knuckles pale, veins raised like blue cords against skin that had thinned with age. The dining room smelled like browned butter and sage, and the candles on my mother’s centerpiece had burned low enough that the wax was starting to puddle.
I actually laughed.
Because the envelope my mother had pressed into my palm earlier—right after appetizers, right after she told me not to mention the amount—had a check inside for $200.
My name is Jordan Graves. I’m 31 years old, and I hunt digital thieves for a living. I’m a cybersecurity analyst for Sentinel Tech in Denver—the kind of job that means my days are made of alerts and patterns, of tiny anomalies that most people never see until it’s too late. I’ve tracked cryptocurrency fraud across seventeen countries, helped the FBI recover $4.2 million tied to ransomware, and testified in federal court four times. I know how to follow money through the darkest corners of the internet.
Turns out the biggest theft of my career was happening at my own family’s Thanksgiving table, under a chandelier my mother dusted twice a week, beside a platter of turkey she’d photographed before anyone was allowed to touch it. Three days before the holiday, my sister Olivia called. I was in my apartment in Denver, three monitors casting a bluish glow over the living room, my hoodie half-zipped, a cup of coffee gone lukewarm on the coaster. Outside my window, the city looked clean and indifferent—traffic sliding along I-25, the mountains distant and steady like they didn’t care what kind of chaos people were making down here.
I was digging into a phishing operation that had been bouncing through Estonia, the kind of scam that starts with a harmless-looking email and ends with someone’s savings evaporating. I had it paused when Olivia’s name lit up on my phone.
Her voice had that particular brightness that always made me suspicious—the tone she used when she wanted something but was pretending she didn’t.
“Hey, Jordy,” she said.
Nobody calls me Jordy except her, and she only does it when she’s trying to soften me up.
“Listen… about Thanksgiving. Maybe you should skip it this year.”
I swiveled my chair away from the screens and stared at the corner of my kitchen where the light didn’t quite reach. “Why?”
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