Ledger by Edward C Distel

Tom Larson learned discipline in the jungles of Vietnam and built a career on it, rising from buck sergeant to corporate vice president on sheer will and the conviction that the right numbers could excuse almost anything.

At Great Lakes Container, "good for business" becomes the answer to every question he'd rather not ask twice. At home in Arlington Heights, his wife Janie raises their children largely alone, and comes to understand exactly what his ambition has cost long before he's willing to name it himself.

Across three decades — from a war he never talks about, through a marriage he fails to protect, to a business built on numbers that don't quite add up — Tom keeps two sets of books: the one he shows the company, and the one only he can see.

Both eventually come due.

THE LEDGER is a novel about the accounting every life eventually requires: what we spend to get somewhere, what we owe the people we spend it on, and what's left to settle when the reckoning finally arrives.