No one responds.
I look from face to face. No one is on my side. No one cares about me.
I am alone.
And I have no one to blame but myself.
“This isn’t happening,” I mutter. “This isn’t real.”
Half an hour passes. Then I am in a small, windowless room that smells of stale sweat. Harold, the lawyer my father sent, sits beside me. He smells of aged tobacco and an air of old-money confidence that I once used to have. My father made the call. I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t figure out the next step. So I called my father and asked him what to do. He’d told me to keep my mouth shut until Harold arrived.
I answer the same questions again and again, my voice growing thinner with each repetition.
I didn’t steal anything.
I didn’t move money.
I didn’t authorize those transfers.
They nod. They make notes. They show no reaction.
Briana gives her statement in another room.
By the time I’m released that night, I already know this isn’t going away.
The investigation takes months.
Months of waiting. Months of silence. Months of waking up every morning and checking my email for news, for updates, for any sign that this is over. Months of lying awake at night running through every conversation, every meeting, every moment I spent with Briana, searching for the exact second when my life tilted off its axis. But it’s like trying to find the exact drop of water that caused a flood. It is everywhere. It is in everything.
Forensics trace the transfers to Briana’s login credentials. But the access logs show Julian-approved permissions. Calendar entries place us together during the key transaction windows.Our Messages sketch a timeline of growing closeness and professional blur.
It doesn’t matter that my fingerprints aren’t on the keyboard that moved the money. It matters that I handed her the key. That I was in the room when it turned. That I had every reason to look away.
Briana’s defense is elegant in its simplicity. A well-executed funeral. My funeral.
She says I coerced her. She says she was afraid. She says I promised protection if she complied and promised to destroy her career if she refused. Her lawyers call it a power imbalance, emotional manipulation, an implied threat from a senior colleague to a subordinate.
I deny everything. I sit in the witness stand and watch the words fall out of my mouth and die on the floor. But in the eyes of the law, intent matters less than circumstance. And circumstance has already written the verdict.
The trial is public enough to ruin me.
I sit in the courtroom, in the same chair, every day. The journalists sit in the back row, their laptops open, their fingers flying across the keys. I try not to look at them. I try not to imagine what they are writing.
The verdict is measured.
No prison time.
I exhale when the judge says it. I had been prepared for prison. I had been prepared to lose years of my life, to wear an orange jumpsuit, to sleep in a cell with a stranger. But the judge does not send me to prison.
Financial penalties. Permanent termination. Civil liability that will follow me for years.
But at least I won’t go to prison.
Briana’s verdict is not the same as mine.
I keep my eyes on the judge when they read her verdict. On the jury. On the wood grain of the bench behind her. Anywhere but at Briana. But I hear the word.Guilty. Then a sound I have never heard from her before—a sharp, wet gasp, like someone punched the air out of her lungs.
The court reviews her coercion claim. They take their time. They weigh everything. It’s all laid out on the table. A collection of damp, unwashed laundry, and I am watching the jury squint at the stains. The power she says I had over her. The lines we blurred. The affair that everyone already knew about.
