She opens the book to the preface, which she now knows by heart: “Auditing is not about finding mistakes. It is about building a world where numbers can be trusted.”

She read on. Irshad didn’t just list procedures. He told a story: a cashier who swapped genuine invoices with forgeries, a warehouse clerk who recorded shipments that never left the dock. For each fraud, Irshad showed how a simple, skeptical voucher examination would have caught it.

But Irshad wrote: “Independence is not isolation. It is the courage to serve the truth, even when it serves no one’s immediate interest.”

That night, Ayesha writes her own margin note next to the final chapter:

A month before finals, Ayesha’s father fell ill. The family printing press business was drowning in tax notices. Her brother begged her to drop auditing and help with accounts. “No one hires fresh auditors,” he said. “Learn tax – that’s money.”