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I may have added that you would be wearing a walking boot, in case they were blind.

The Proprietress

I’ll be there in an hour.

The conference room at Cascadia Legal Partners has hosted a hundred meetings I’ve been to, forgotten about, and don’t care to remember. But this one I’ve been working toward for weeks. Or more accurately, months.

My grandfather sits at the head of the table with the presence of a man who has seen it all in his forty years of practicing law. Difficult decisions passed down as judgments without apologies.

Richard Hale is to his left, cleaning his spectacles as if he doesn’t want to miss a moment of the upcoming show. Rhodes is at the far end, looking older than he did even an hour ago when we broke the news to him. The Morrison Rose compliance officer—a woman named Patricia Chen who drove in from Portland this morning with Richard and my grandfather, and has already read every document twice—sits beside Richard with a yellow legal pad covered in notes.

I am standing at the window, scanning the street below, trying to see if I can catch a glimpse of Phoenix when Cassandra walks in.

She is dressed to show off. Tailored cream blazer, too-tall heels with a red bottom, and hair freshly blown out. She takes in the room, and I watch the calculation happen behind her eyes as she sees who is here, what it means, what she still has to work with.

Cassandra finds my grandfather first. Something flickers across her face that she recovers from almost immediately. Almost.

“Mr. Morrison,” she says, going in for a hug. My grandfather doesn’t move forward and she drops her arms awkwardly.

“I didn’t know you were coming into town. Jackson didn’t mention⁠—”

“Sit down, Cassandra,” my grandfather says, sounding like a principal instead of a man who is attempting to acquire the firm. She sits.

Patricia Chen opens the folder in front of her without preamble. “Ms. Pierce. I am going to walk you through what we have found and give you the opportunity to respond to each item. I would encourage you to listen fully before speaking.”

Cassandra darts her gaze to mine, seeking reassurance or help; she receives neither.

“Morrison Rose’s compliance review of Cascadia Legal Partners identified financial irregularities across multiple billing cycles.” Patricia turns the first document toward Cassandra. “Deleted invoice chains. Altered timestamps. Fund transfers to entities that did not exist prior to your employment here.”

Cassandra looks at the documents and back to Patricia, a practiced smile on her face. “Those are legacy accounting issues, nothing to do with⁠—”

“The shell entity,” Patricia continues as if Cassandra has not spoken, “traces to a legal services account you controlled through informal representation of Yarrow Holdings. We have the account structure.” She turns to another document. “We have the authorization signatures.” Another. “And we have the activation timestamp on an account belonging to a Lena Castellanos, which predates your call to Officer Brian Dickson of the Cascadia Police Department by eleven days.”

I watch Cassandra’s face as Patricia speaks, and I can see the exact moment she understands that we have the sequence of events all lined up perfectly. Cassandra did not stumble onto Lena’s connection to Yarrow Holdings. She built it. She used Lena’s dormant account as a payment vehicle for her own Yarrow work, deliberately activated it, and then made one phone call to a police officer that set everything else in motion. Phoenix suspended. Lena threatened. Two women removed from the board in a single move.

Eleven days between the implementation of Lena’s account and that call. Eleven days of Cassandra knowing she was going to implicate Lena, and Phoenix along with her, just waiting for the right moment. Eleven days when I should have asked harder questions. And because I didn’t, Phoenix lost her reputation, her career at Cascadia Legal Partners.

Rhodes makes a sound that is not quite a word.

“This is—” Cassandra straightens, switching from management to damage control. She turns to Rhodes. “Don. We have known each other since I was a kid. Dad and I⁠—”

“Your father is ill,” Rhodes says, gentler now. “Everyone in this room knows that.”

For the first time, something cracks a bit. Not guilt or remorse. Exhaustion.

“I was trying to keep him in treatment,” Cassandra explains. “We got him in some drug trials, but it was expensive. I-I wanted to make him proud at the firm, let him know things would be taken care of. When a representative from Yarrow approached me … everything spiraled from there,” she exults, scanning the room.

The room stays silent as Rhodes nods once. “And you still made every choice that followed. He would be ashamed.”

It’s the only thing he says in the entire meeting that appears to hurt him. I see it in the set of his jaw. Cassandra turns to me. The last option.

“Jackson.” Her voice drops. A different register than she has used with anyone else in this room. The one she deployed in hallways, private-office chats, and every carefully managed moment she believed she had leverage. “Everything I did was for this acquisition. For Morrison Rose. For your grandfather’s firm. You know that.”

“I know you think that.” I lean forward, forearms resting against the table, eyes boring into hers. “That’s not a defense.”

Something in her expression changes. Again, not remorse, but more of a recalibration. She has lost the room and knows it and is already calculating the next move.

Patricia closes the folder. “The Oregon State Bar has been notified of this filing as of nine this morning. Your access to Cascadia Legal Partners systems has been suspended, effective immediately. Security will escort you to collect your personal items.”