Damon closed his eyes. Keisha looked up. Andre stopped typing. Terrence set down his coffee. The room went quiet.
"50 million," Damon said.
"That's not the worst part. They've also filed an emergency motion to freeze your accounts. If the judge grants it, you can't make payroll next week."
Damon looked at the crayon drawing on the wall, the stick figure with the stars. He could hear Nora's voice in his head: "When you show them Daddy, they'll clap." Nobody was clapping right now.
"What do we do, Tessa?"
"We fight. But you need to understand something. Gregory Crane didn't file this lawsuit to win. He filed it to bury you. The discovery process alone will take months. They'll drown you in paperwork, depositions, subpoenas. They have a legal team of 30. You have me. This is a war of attrition, and he's betting you can't afford to survive it."
Gregory wasn't just fighting in the courtroom. He was fighting in the press. Within 48 hours of the lawsuit filing, anonymous sources close to Whitfield and Crane started talking to tech reporters. The narrative was surgical. Damon Ingram was a disgruntled former employee. He'd been fired for performance issues. The algorithm was built on company infrastructure. He'd stolen proprietary data on his way out the door.
None of it was true. All of it was effective. The story hit three major tech blogs in the same week, headlines Damon couldn't escape. "Bridge Point founder accused of stealing former employer's technology." "Whitfield and Crane files $50M suit against ex-employee's startup." "Questions surround the origins of Bridge Point's core algorithm."
Two client contracts paused pending the lawsuit. A third called Elaine directly. "We love the product, but we can't be associated with a company under IP litigation. Call us when it's resolved."
Damon's face was on tech blogs next to the word theft. The same face Gregory Crane had called a dog. The same face that had walked out of that boardroom with nothing but a crayon drawing. And now the world was being told that face belonged to a thief.
Nora came home from school on a Friday afternoon. She set her backpack on the floor, sat at the kitchen table, and didn't start her homework. She just sat there.
Lorraine noticed first. "What's wrong, baby girl?"
"A boy at school said Daddy stole something. He said his mom read it on the internet."
Lorraine's jaw tightened. She looked at Damon.
Damon knelt down in front of his daughter. "Nora, look at me. I didn't steal anything. I built something. There's a difference. And sometimes, when you build something good, people who didn't build it try to take it from you. That's what's happening right now."
"But why?"
"Because they're scared, baby. Scared people do mean things."
Nora thought about that for a second. Then she said, "When I build my Lego castle and somebody knocks it down, I just build it again. Bigger."
Damon pulled her into his arms and held on until she squirmed away to get a snack.
The legal fight was suffocating. Gregory's legal team, 30 attorneys from one of Chicago's most prestigious firms, buried Tessa in discovery requests. 14,000 documents, six depositions, motions to compel, motions to dismiss counterclaims, motions on top of motions. Every week, a new filing. Every filing, another bill BridgePoint could barely afford to pay.
Tessa fought back with precision. She pulled every commit log from Damon's personal GitHub account. Every timestamp, every file path. The code was written between 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. night after night on a personal laptop using personal software licenses connected to Damon's home Wi-Fi network. Not a single bite touched a Whitfield and Crane server. The evidence wasn't just clean. It was airtight.
But, evidence doesn't matter when you can't afford to present it. Gregory's strategy wasn't about facts. It was about exhaustion. Bleed the startup dry. Force a settlement. Take the algorithm for pennies on the dollar. He'd done it before to smaller companies. It always worked. It was working now.
By month three of litigation, Bridgepoint's legal costs had hit $400,000. Elaine covered most of it, but even she had limits. The team took a collective pay cut. Andre started sleeping at the office to save on rent. Kesha picked up freelance work on weekends to cover her bills. Nobody complained. Nobody left.
Damon sat alone in the office at 2:00 in the morning on a Wednesday. The screens were dark. The coffee was cold. The crayon drawing hung on the wall in front of him, barely visible in the glow of a street light through the window. He stared at it for a long time. He thought about Celeste. He thought about the night she died. The phone call. The hospital hallway. The doctor's face. He thought about Nora asking why daddy was crying.
He almost quit. Right there. 2:00 in the morning. Alone in a room above a barber shop. He almost picked up his phone and called Tessa and said, "Settle. Give Gregory whatever he wants. Just make it stop."
Then the door opened. Lorraine walked in carrying a thermos of coffee and a Tupperware container of beef stew. She didn't ask why he was sitting in the dark. She didn't ask if he was okay. She set the food down, pulled up a chair, sat next to him, and said one word. "Eat."
He ate. She sat with him. They didn't talk. They didn't need to. Sometimes the most powerful thing a person can do for you is just refuse to let you be alone.
When he finished, Lorraine looked at the drawing on the wall. "You remember when Nora made that? The night I told her about the algorithm. She didn't understand a word you said. You know that, right? She just saw her daddy's face light up when he talked about it. That's why she drew the stars." Lorraine paused. "That little girl didn't draw stars because she understood your idea, Damon. She drew them because she understood you."
He didn't quit. He went back to work the next morning. And the morning after that. And the morning after that.
Three weeks later, the case broke open.