She reached into her bag and pulled out a thick folder.
“He kept this.”
Inside were printouts of public filings tied to my companies, notes on my holdings, references to my network, screenshots, scraps of information collected by a man who had finally realized too late that the person he dismissed at a vineyard might be standing under every floor he thought he’d climbed himself.
“I found it in storage,” Ivy said. “He was trying to understand how much you owned. Who you knew. What he could still get around.”
I leafed through it once, then closed it.
“Did you know?”
“No.”
I looked at her.
She started crying then, not elegantly, not performatively, but like someone exhausted by the effort of holding herself together for the wrong audience.
“I was so proud of him,” she said. “I thought being chosen by someone like that meant I was finally enough.”
