“You’re describing an alliance with the woman who has been publicly accusing you of corruption for the past three weeks.” Andrew’s tone was neutral, but his eyes were sharp. He was testing the proposition, not resisting it. “An alliance that would require sharing privileged client documentation with an active adversary.”
“With a filmmaker conducting an investigation that our own evidence confirms is accurate. There’s a legal distinction.”
Adriana straightened her cuffs.
Andrew’s pen tapped twice against his knee. “There’s a legal gray area. Which is where this entire situation has been living since you wrote that memo three years ago.”
Adriana acknowledged this with a nod that cost her more than it should have. The gray area was exactly the problem. She had spent her career building structures that turned gray areas into defensible positions, and now she was standing in the middle of one that her own inaction had created.
“The alternative is to continue defending Burty’s position while knowing that his position is indefensible,” she said. “That’s not a gray area. That’s a decision to participate in the cover-up of fraud. I won’t do it.”
The certainty in her own voice surprised her. The logic had been building since the gala. The conviction behind the words ran deeper, and it had the irreversible quality of a door that opened in only one direction.
“I’m describing the only strategy that protects the firm, satisfies our ethical obligations, and ensures that Burty Howarth is exposed by the truth rather than defended against it.” She turned from the window and met Andrew’s eyes. “Yes. An alliance. With Sienna Ramirez.”
Andrew held her gaze. His expression was careful, but relief was leaking through the edges.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” he said. “Not for the strategy. For you to decide that the right thing and the smart thing were the same thing.”
The honesty was gentle, which was somehow worse than if it had been sharp. Andrew stood and buttoned his jacket, a gesture of transition, the physical punctuation mark between the conversation they’d just had and the work that would follow it. “I’ll start preparing the documentation for transfer. If we’re doing this, it needs to be done properly. Clean copies, chain of custody, nothing that could be challenged on procedural grounds.”
“Andrew.”
He paused at the door.
“Thank you for putting the memo in the folder.”
He nodded once. The nod said everything his words didn’t. That he had carried what he knew for three years, that he had trusted her to arrive at the right place on her own, and that the arrival was worth the wait.
He closed the door behind him. Adriana sat in the silence of her office with the memo in her hands and the city’s light on her face and the beginning of a decision she could not yet name taking shape in the space behind her ribs.
She was about to dismantle the most profitable client relationship of her career. She was about to hand evidence to a woman who had publicly accused her of corruption. She was about to step off the edge of the structure she had spent fifteen years building and trust that the fall would land somewhere better than where she was standing.
An alliance with Sienna Ramirez. The woman with warm eyes and the conviction of someone who had organized her entire life around telling the truth. The woman who stood close enough for Adriana to catch the warmth of her skin beneath a scent clean and simple and did not look away.
The woman Adriana could not stop thinking about, for reasons that had stopped pretending to be professional somewhere around the second conversation. In twenty years of practicing law, she had never once lost sleep over opposing counsel. She was losing sleep now.
She set the memo on her desk beside the white orchid, opened a new document on her laptop, and began drafting the terms of an approach she had never expected to make.
7
SIENNA
The financial documents arrived on a Tuesday morning in a manila envelope with no return address, left on the doorstep of the Silver Lake office sometime before Sienna got there at seven-fifteen.
She stood in the doorway of the converted garage with the envelope in her hands and the smell of motor oil and jasmine in the morning air and knew, before she opened it, that this was the break.
The envelope contained forty-three pages of internal accounting records from Howarth Media Group. Disbursement schedules. Wire transfer confirmations. Account statements for six of the shell companies that Sienna and Dani had identified through their source interviews. The documents were photocopies, not originals, and the source had redacted their own identifying information with a black marker so thorough that not even the paper stock could be traced.
But the numbers were there. The dates. The recipient accounts. The amounts that matched, almost to the dollar, the testimony their sources had provided.
Sienna spread the pages across the workbench that served as their primary editing surface and called Dani.
“Get here.”
“It’s seven-twenty in the morning and I’m in my pajamas.”
“Get here now.”