The hours following the hearing were a masterclass in institutional exorcism. I wasn’t fired; I was simply erased. My security badge, the one that granted me access to the highest echelons of Quinn & Thorne, was deactivated before I even reached the lobby. My corporate accounts—email, internal servers, the private cloud where I’d stored seven years of my life’s work—vanished as if they’d never existed. Colleagues who had once sought my counsel for their most complex cases now averted their eyes in the hallways, their faces a mixture of pity and fear. I was a ghost haunting the place I had built.
I spent the next two days in a state of suspended animation, moving through the shell of my life. I didn’t pack. I didn’t run. I sat in the sterile silence of my now-too-large apartment, the one M
