Arthur fought me on it for months. He said the old way worked fine and that we didn’t need some fancy computer program.

I thought he was just being an old-fashioned Midwestern man who hated change.

My own father was like that about his Buick, driving it until the floorboards rusted out because he didn’t trust newer cars with computer chips.

So I didn’t think much of it. But Mark eventually convinced him to let me try.

I started moving everything to a cloud-based spreadsheet program last winter. That was when I found the first crack.

It was a small utility payment to a company called Vance Forestry Services. The invoice was for 4,500 dollars.

But when I looked up Vance Forestry Services in the state registry, nothing came up. I asked Arthur about it during lunch one Tuesday.

We were sitting in the break room, and the microwave was humming. Arthur didn’t even look up from his ham sandwich.

He told me it was an old consultant fee we paid for land surveys up north and that I should just copy what Clara did. His voice was so casual, so completely unbothered.

But something about his eyes felt wrong. They were too still.

So I kept digging when Arthur went to the lumber yard’s storage barns on Friday afternoons. I went through the physical files in the back room.

That was where I found the navy blue leather binder. It was an old, tattered thing with a broken brass zipper that didn’t close right.

Arthur kept it in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, beneath a stack of old tax returns from 1998. I don’t even know why I opened it.

Maybe it was just a gut feeling. Inside, there were hand-written receipts dating back eighteen months.

Every single month, a wire transfer of exactly 13,333 dollars was sent to an account in Ohio. The total came out to exactly 240,000 dollars.

The authorizations were signed with Mark’s name. But the handwriting wasn’t Mark’s.

Mark writes his capital M with a sharp, pointed top. The signature on these forms had a rounded, lazy loop.

It was Arthur’s handwriting. He had been forging his own son’s signature on corporate bank transfers.

My stomach felt sick. I went home that night and sat on our bed, looking at Mark while he folded his laundry.

He looked so tired. He had spent ten hours on his feet, loading heavy treated lumber onto trailers.

His back always hurt, but he never complained because he wanted to keep his grandfather’s business alive. How could I tell him his father was stealing from us?

And worse, how could I tell him his father was setting him up to take the fall? Because that is what those signatures meant.