Clay Haverty put my private chats on the conference-room screen at 9:04 on a Monday, eight feet tall.
"Let's read what our paralegal thinks of us."
Seventy people sat in Conference Room 31A.
The rest of Ostrander Keane watched on video.
The firm had 138 people, 64 of them lawyers.
My name sat at the top of the screen in Teams blue.
Delia Reyburn
Under it was Paige Lundeen.
Paige was twenty-nine, a freelance court reporter, and my best friend.
The chat had twenty-three messages, sent Thursday night between 10:14 and 10:31.
Clay read the first one himself.
"I wrote every page of the Bettendorf opposition."
He paused for the room.
"He changed the font."
The laughter came in a wave from the back.
Clay was fifty-one and tan in November.
On March 12 he had won Ruth Bettendorf $41,000,000.
He mentioned it every week.
The brief that got him there was 31 pages long.
I had written all 31.
I stood by the window where he'd told me to stand.
I was twenty-eight.
I had worked here since August 2, 2021.
In five years of Monday all-hands, I had never been the agenda.
At 9:10 he scrolled.
He's never read paragraph 7.
"Paragraph seven," Clay said.
"Of a document I signed."
"Five years, and she thinks typing is writing."
There was more laughter, thinner this time.
He scrolled again and found the line he wanted.
"A company that shreds its own test logs has already told the jury what they said."
He read it slowly, like evidence.
"That's my sealed brief."
"She's quoting my sealed brief to a court reporter."
A few lawyers at the long table stopped smiling.
I knew where that sentence lived.
Clay didn't.
My phone was in my pocket.
On the Colorado Supreme Court's attorney search, my name came up with Registration No. 60592.
It had been live for 38 days.
I'd finished the University of Denver's night program on May 16.
I'd sat the bar on July 28 and 29.
The results came October 2.
A county judge swore me in on October 9.
Nobody in this room had asked.
The protective order in Bettendorf had a list called Attachment 1.
It had nine names.
One of them was mine.
At 9:15 Clay held up a yellow page.
I knew it from across the room.
He had taken it off my cubicle wall at 8:50.
I'd watched him do it.
It was page one of my outline for the Bettendorf brief, in blue ink.
It was dated 11/14/2022.
spoliation → adverse inference
That line was circled twice.
"Here's her proof."
He turned it to the camera.
"A doodle."
He crumpled it in one fist and dropped it on the conference table.
It rolled to a stop by a water pitcher.
A chair scraped near the door.
Jonah Calloway stood up.
He was thirty-six, co-counsel from Ferris Calloway, in early for a fee meeting.
He didn't work for Clay.
"I read her drafts, Clay."
Clay didn't look at him.
"Sit down."
"This is my firm."
Jonah walked to the table.
He picked up the yellow ball and opened it against the wood.
He smoothed it with the flat of his hand, corner to corner.
"My co-counsel."
He tapped the page.
"Her pages."
"Her pages," Clay repeated.
"She typed what I said, Jonah."
"She wrote it, Clay!"
The whole room heard that.
Jonah folded the page once and put it in his jacket pocket.
Lorna Keane stood at the back wall with her arms crossed.
She was fifty-eight and the managing partner.
Her father's name was on the door.
Two strangers stood beside her.
Both wore green lanyards.
I was too far away to read the print.
At 9:20 Clay came around the table.
He stopped six feet from me, where the camera could see us both.
"You're done."
"Effective now."
"Say thank you for five years."
Seventy faces waited.
So did the video squares.
"You're welcome," I said.
Somebody in the front row started to laugh and stopped.
Clay's jaw moved.
"So nobody calls it gossip, it goes on the record."
"Every inbox."
He turned back to his laptop.
"Andre's on his way up."
"Nobody leaves until he's here."
Lorna checked her watch.
The green lanyards checked theirs.
Nobody left.
Clay typed at the head of the table for twenty minutes.
He didn't sit, and neither did I.
Jonah stayed by the water pitcher with one hand over his pocket.
At 9:41 Clay lifted his phone and tapped it once.
Every phone in the room buzzed.