The file arrived at six fifty-three on Friday morning.
Jade was already at her kitchen table, hair unbound, wearing a shirt that belonged to Dominic because she had stayed again and her own clothes were folded on his bedroom chair, coffee cooling beside her laptop. She had been awake since five, running through the board meeting structure in her mind, mapping the angles, identifying the weaknesses in their position and the strengths they had not yet fully deployed.
When the encrypted file landed in her inbox from the contact she had called three days ago she set down her coffee and opened it immediately.
She read for forty-five minutes without stopping.
By the time she reached the final page her coffee was cold and the shirt she was wearing felt insufficient armor for what she was now holding.
She closed the laptop and sat for a moment in Dominic's quiet kitchen with the early morning light coming grey and thin through the windows and the sounds of the city assembling itself below. She thought about the shape of what she had just read. She turned it over carefully, the way she turned over anything that mattered, looking for the interpretation that was less damning, the alternative reading, the innocent explanation.
There was none.
She heard him before she saw him, his footsteps on the kitchen floor, and then he was in the doorway in a dark shirt and no jacket looking at her face with the immediate attention he always gave her, reading her the way he always did before she had said a single word.
"How bad," he said.
She looked at him. "Sit down."
He sat.
She opened the laptop and turned it toward him.
He read. She watched his face do the same thing it had done when she showed him Dana's access logs, that controlled stillness, that going-quiet of a man absorbing something at depth. But this time it was longer. This time the stillness lasted through several pages and by the end of it something in his expression had moved past anger into a colder and more deliberate place.
He closed the laptop.
"Fourteen months," he said.
"Fourteen months," she confirmed. "Webb has been feeding Harrow Capital privileged legal information since before Celeste registered the company. The sequencing matters. She did not recruit Webb after setting up the vehicle. She set up the vehicle after she already had Webb."
Dominic looked at the closed laptop. "She approached him while we were still together."
"Yes."
The word landed in the kitchen and stayed there.
"While she was in my home," he said quietly. "While she was sitting at this table. She was already building the mechanism to dismantle what I had built if I ever ended things with her."
"Or to profit from a leadership change regardless of the personal outcome," Jade said. "I do not think this was purely about you ending the relationship. I think the relationship was always partially a vehicle for access. When it ended she simply accelerated a plan that was already in motion."
He stood and went to the window and she let him have the silence. Outside the city was fully awake now, the early grey burned off, the sky sharp and cold and clear.
"What specifically did he give her," Dominic said. His back was to her but his voice was precise.
She told him.
Webb had provided Harrow Capital with advance knowledge of three significant corporate decisions before they were made public. A planned acquisition of a smaller competitor that Dominic had ultimately decided against, the decision against it moving the market in a way that had benefited a short position Celeste had established. A restructuring of one of the subsidiary companies that had temporarily depressed its valuation, during which Harrow Capital had acquired a significant stake at the lowered price. And most recently, preliminary details of the Harmon account negotiations, the information that had reached Harmon himself and nearly derailed the pitch.
Each piece of information on its own was damaging. Together they formed a pattern of insider trading that was not merely a corporate governance failure. It was a criminal matter.
Dominic turned from the window.
"She committed securities fraud," he said.
"Multiple instances," Jade said. "Webb is an accessory to all of it and possibly a primary actor in the third instance given the Harmon information came through the legal division's copies of the pitch documents."
"And the board complaint."
"Is the distraction," Jade said. "A well-constructed one. If the board is focused on a governance complaint about your personal conduct, they are not looking at the investment activity of one of your silent investors. The complaint creates noise in exactly the direction that keeps eyes away from what Celeste has actually been doing."
He crossed the room and sat back down at the table and looked at her with the full focused intelligence that she found, even now in the middle of all of this, extraordinarily compelling.
"You have the documentation," he said.
"Everything my contact found is in that file. It is not yet in a form that a court would accept without further forensic accounting work but it is more than enough to take to a criminal defense attorney today and understand what we are actually holding."
"I have an attorney," he said. "Not Webb."
"Obviously not Webb," she said. "Who else."
"A woman named Priya Anand. She is outside the company completely, I use her for personal matters only, Webb has no knowledge of her." He paused. "She is also the best securities litigator in the city."
Jade nodded. "Call her today."
"I will call her in one hour," he said. "I want to understand everything in that file before I hand it to anyone else." He looked at her. "Walk me through it. All of it. From the beginning."
So she did.
They sat at his kitchen table for two hours and she walked him through every page of the financial picture her contact had assembled. The shell companies Celeste had used to obscure Harrow Capital's positions. The timing correlations between Webb's access logs and the market activity. The paper trail that connected the privileged information to the trades with a consistency that was beyond coincidental. She was precise and thorough and she did not soften any of it and he listened with the same focused attention he gave everything that mattered.
When she finished he sat back and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"The board meeting is Tuesday," he said.
"Yes."
"Celeste filed the complaint expecting it to land in a room full of board members who do not know what she has been doing," he said. "She expects me to be defending my personal conduct while she sits in the gallery as an aggrieved investor."
"Instead," Jade said, "we walk into Tuesday with a securities fraud case and the documentation to support it and we let the board understand exactly what kind of investor has been occupying a seat at their table."
He looked at her. "We."
She met his gaze. "Did you think I was going to build this case and then stay home on Tuesday?"
Something moved through his face. Not quite a smile. Warmer than that.
"Priya will need to advise on what we present and how," he said.
"Of course."
"And Ryan Cole," he said.
She had been thinking about Ryan. She had been thinking about Ryan since Dana put his name on that sheet of paper. Ryan who was twenty-three and in over his head and had made a decision that was stupid and naive and born of flattery from a woman who had used him as a tool without caring at all what it cost him.
"I want to talk to Ryan before any of this goes to the board," she said. "I want to give him the opportunity to understand what he was part of and what he can do about it."
Dominic looked at her carefully. "You want to give him a way out."
"I want him to understand the full picture," she said. "What Celeste used him for, what it means legally, and what his options are. Then I want him to make a choice with complete information. If he cooperates it strengthens our position considerably. If he does not, we proceed without him and he faces the consequences of that choice."
"You are being generous with someone who leaked your pitch materials."
"I am being strategic with someone who can help us," she said. "The generosity is incidental."
He looked at her for a moment. "Is it."
She held his gaze. "Mostly."
He almost smiled again. She was collecting those almost-smiles like evidence of something.
He picked up his phone and called Priya Anand. The call lasted eleven minutes and when it was done he had an appointment for two o'clock that afternoon and an attorney who had heard enough in those eleven minutes to describe the situation as, in her exact words, exceptionally actionable.
Jade showered and changed into the clothes she had arrived in the previous evening and stood at his mirror pinning her hair and felt him come to stand in the doorway behind her, watching her with his shoulder against the frame and his arms folded.
"You are going to want to talk to Ryan today," he said.
"This morning," she said. "Before the day gets away from us."
"And tonight," he said, "I am taking you to dinner. Not to talk about any of this. Not to strategise or plan or build a case." He held her gaze in the mirror. "Just dinner."
She looked at his reflection. At the way he was looking at her.
"Just dinner," she agreed.
She went to the office and went straight to Ryan Cole's desk.
He looked up and saw her face and whatever colour he had in the morning drained out of him immediately. He knew. She could see that he had been waiting for this and dreading it and some part of him was almost relieved that the waiting was over.
"Conference room," she said quietly. "Now."
He followed her in and she closed the door and sat across from him and looked at the young face of a person who had made a catastrophic decision and was only now understanding the full dimensions of it.
She told him everything.
She told him what Celeste had been doing. What Webb had provided. What the trades had returned. She told him what insider trading carried as a criminal penalty and she told him that his access logs were documented and verified and that she had enough to take to the board and then to the authorities without his cooperation.
He sat across from her getting progressively smaller in his chair.
When she finished he was looking at his hands on the table and his jaw was working.
"She told me it was competitive research," he said. His voice was very young. "She said every firm does it. She said it was not illegal what she was asking for, just market intelligence."
"And the money she paid you," Jade said.
He looked up. "I did not take money."
She looked at him.
"I did not," he said. "She told me she could introduce me to investors. That she could open doors. I was not paid." He looked back at his hands. "I was stupid."
Jade sat with that for a moment. It did not change what he had done. But it changed the shape of him slightly in her mind.
"You have a choice," she said. "You can cooperate fully with what comes next and that cooperation will be on record when this reaches the people it is going to reach. Or you can say nothing, in which case the documented evidence stands alone and your part in it is characterized by whatever the attorneys and eventually the authorities decide to call it." She paused. "I would strongly advise you to also retain your own attorney before Tuesday."
He nodded. He looked wrecked and young and thoroughly frightened.
She stood.
"Ryan," she said. He looked up. "She used you. She knew exactly what she was doing and she used you because you were accessible and ambitious and she knew how to speak to both of those things." She held his gaze. "That does not absolve you. But I want you to understand it clearly."
She left him sitting in the conference room and walked back to her office and sat down and took a long breath and let it out slowly.
Four days ago she had been a new director with a pitch to build and a mild suspicion about a floor she was still learning. Now she was sitting at the center of a securities fraud case, a board confrontation, and the most significant professional and personal collision of her life.
She opened her laptop.
She had a pitch to finish and a board presentation to build and a dinner to look forward to.
She started with the pitch.
Work first.
Always work first.