Imani had always been the kind of nine-year-old who photographed everything. So when she saw an open laptop on her aunt Shantelle’s screen weeks earlier, she casually took a screenshot on her tablet without understanding what she had captured. The folder had our family name on it, and at the time, it meant nothing to her. But later, when I was sitting on the kitchen floor talking about money, Imani remembered the screenshot and showed it to me.

The filename inside that image led a forensic accountant to a cloud account. What we found there changed everything. The border-room call had frozen the money, but frozen money wasn’t the same as recovered money. There were lawyers, court filings in two countries, and months of uncertainty ahead. And then Shantelle said something during that call that I had never expected to hear. Click continue reading below