All Chapters of I Slept With My Best Friend's Son: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

I got into the car that had been waiting outside the DA's office and I watched the rest of it on my phone.The livestream showed me the venue — a tech event space in the financial district that seated three hundred and was currently holding closer to four. Cameras on tripods along the walls. Journalists in the middle rows with press lanyards and laptops open. Cryptocurrency people I couldn't name but recognised by type — the ones who followed every platform launch and market movement with the specific intensity of people whose whole world lived in those numbers. Financial press in the front section. And the rest of the crowd — tech adjacent, curious, people who had seen the press release about a new platform launch and decided a Tuesday morning downtown was worth their time.None of them knew what they had actually come to see.That was the point.---Evan was backstage.I could not see him on the livestream — the camera was on the stage, the empty podium, the screen behind it with a

I watched the first hour from the car and then from the street and then from my kitchen, and what I watched was a very large thing coming down very fast.HR Group stock had been in freefall since eleven minutes after Evan named Rhett on that stage. I know the exact time because the financial alert on my phone went off while I was still in the car and I watched the number moving in the wrong direction with the focused attention of someone who had spent two years understanding exactly what that number represented and what it meant for it to move. By the time I got home it had dropped forty-two percent. By lunch it would be worse.Rhett's board had called an emergency meeting before the press conference had officially ended — I saw it referenced on the financial news ticker running along the bottom of the livestream. His attorney's office phone was going to voicemail, which I knew because Gerald tried to reach him on an unrelated matter and called me to report the failure with barely con

Carter called me at ten the next morning.I was at my desk working on Cayla's brief when the phone rang — the number I had saved two days ago, the one I picked up on the first ring now because calls from that number were not calls to let go to voicemail."I thought you should know," he said. "We had a walk-in this morning. Kyra Reed. She came in with her own attorney. No prompting from our office — she was simply here when we opened."I sat back in my chair."She's cooperative?" I said."Fully," he said. "Her attorney is thorough, the terms are straightforward. She wants to give a complete statement." A pause. "I'll send you a summary this evening. I thought you might want to be present for the interview but I wanted to check first."I looked at the window. Thought about it."Send me the summary," I said. "I won't be there."---I want to tell you why that was harder than I expected.I sat at home through the morning and into the afternoon while Kyra Reed sat in a conference room two

Ashley called at two in the afternoon on a Thursday and I almost didn't answer.I looked at the name on the screen and held the phone in my hand while it rang and made the calculation I made about every call I wasn't certain about — what is the cost of answering versus what is the cost of not. Ashley's statement to the DA was already in process through Kyra's disclosure. Whatever she called me to say, I did not strictly need to hear it.But I was a lawyer, and lawyers did not ignore information when it was being offered to them directly, and I wanted to know which version of Ashley this was before I decided what to do with the call.I answered.---It was a version I had not heard before.Not the warmth — the eleven-year warmth that had turned out to be operational rather than genuine, the specific warmth of someone who had been instructed to maintain a friendship for informational purposes and had done so competently. Not the hurt, the performance of injury that had always been Ashle

The ten-minute recess ran to fourteen.I sat at the table and did not look at the gallery and did not reach for my phone and did not do anything except wait, which was one of the things I had always been better at than people expected. Patience looked like passivity from the outside. From the inside it was just the decision to let time do the work it was going to do anyway.The door behind the bench opened.The judge came back in and everyone in the room stood and then sat, the specific choreography of courtrooms that did not change regardless of what was being decided inside them.The room went still.---He denied the motion.Five sentences, clear and without ambiguity, read from a document he had apparently written during the recess — he was a judge who wrote his rulings as he went rather than announcing from notes, which I respected because it meant he had already thought it through completely before he said a word of it out loud.The asset freeze motion was denied. The trust asse