Chapter 53: Every Byte Remembered
Martin called me himself, which he had never done before.
Nora, he said. I want you to hear this from me before you read it anywhere.
He did not enjoy making that call. Senior partners do not enjoy anything that admits their locks were slow.
The firm was treating the copied files as stolen property.
Because that is what they were.
Their counsel had sent a demand that morning. Return everything. Certify every copy destroyed. Preserve every device he owned, untouched.
The letter went out on the heavy letterhead, and it did not use the word please.
It is a civil matter, Martin said.
Then, after a pause: For now.
For now is a heavy phrase in a lawyer's mouth.
The firm's insurers had been notified too, he said, and insurers do not bluff.
Grant got the letter on a Tuesday. Dale was with him when he opened it, which is the only reason I can tell you what happened next.
He went white, then red, then quiet.
In Grant, that was the dangerous order.
They cannot prove anything, he said.
Dale read the letter twice and told him they already had.
The firm logged everything that touched its servers.
Not just that the folder was opened. Every file. Every byte. Timed to the second, tagged to his login, tied to the serial number of the laptop sitting in his kitchen.
He had not watched a film of his own theft.
He had starred in it.
Dale says Grant laughed then, the way men laugh when the room gets smaller.
It is my work, he said. My cases. My documents.
It was never yours, Dale told him. That is the whole problem, Grant. It was the firm's. Everything you ever stood on was borrowed, and you called it height.
If the bar hears about this, Dale said, your license becomes another proceeding, not a shield.
They did not speak for two days.
In those two days the letter sat on his kitchen table, weighted down by the coffee tin.
The one that no longer had the drive in it.
He told himself it was a divorce tactic. He told himself Martin was bluffing.
He told himself a lot of things by then, and the telling had stopped working.
Then Grant did the math men like him always do last.
If the exhibits were stolen, the complaint was built on a crime scene.
Every page he had filed was now a confession with a caption.
So at midnight, in the kitchen, he snapped the little drive in half with his bare hands.
He drove across town and dropped the pieces in a dumpster behind a burger place.
He checked it twice. Once when he dropped them, once from the car, as if garbage moves.
Dale found out because Grant told him, proud of it, the way he used to report a clever trade.
Too late.
The firm did not need his copy.
They had the logs, the serial number, the access window.
And an affidavit from their IT manager, already sworn, already sitting in a file with a tab on it.
By nine the next morning, the affidavit existed.
By ten, it was attached to something.
The thing about destroying evidence, Dale told him, is that it only proves you knew.
Grant sat very still for a long time.
The rental's one good lamp buzzed over the kitchen table where the letter lay.
Then he asked the question that ends chapters of a life.
What do I do now?
Dale says he gave him the only honest answer left.
Get a lawyer you can afford.
Grant laughed again, quieter this time, the laugh of a man doing arithmetic.
There is no such thing anymore, he said.