The file on my phone was the conference-room clip. I did not play the audio at the table. I did not need to. I simply let Colton see the frozen frame of himself standing in front of my private demo file, timestamped, on a screen his firm was never authorized to open, and I watched a man who had spent two dinners deciding what kind of woman I was realize, in real time, exactly what kind he had actually been dealing with. He set his spoon down very carefully. My father asked what it was. I turned the phone so Sienna could see it too, because she deserved to.

Then I said the only sentence I had prepared. Reyes Anderton Capital accessed Ledgerly’s private environment thirty-six times over twenty-one days, and the platform they described tonight as their promising compliance play is mine, and I have the logs, and my attorney has the logs, and Colton knew all of it while he was calling me dependable at my mother’s table. The jazz kept playing. Nobody at that table moved.

Colton tried the version where it was all a misunderstanding, a firm looking at a public opportunity. I told him Ledgerly is not public, has never been public, and that the only way his firm had a demo file open in a conference room was that someone gave it to them, and that the someone was the man off-screen he had reported to. The cease-and-desist went out the following Monday.