Leah's POV
He picked up on the first ring.
No hello. No introduction. Just silence on his end, like he'd been sitting there with the phone already in his hand, waiting.
I spoke first because I refused to let him have that too. "What do you mean the evidence was faked?"
Roman's voice was lower than I remembered from the courtroom. Quieter. He said, "Not over the phone. Come to my office tomorrow. Nine in the morning." A pause. "Please."
That last word stopped me. Roman Ashford did not seem like a man who said please. In eight months of watching him move through that courtroom like he owned every room he walked into, I had never once heard him say it.
I told him I'd think about it and hung up before he could say anything else.
Then I stood in my kitchen for ten minutes doing absolutely nothing.
Here is what I knew about Roman Ashford. He was thirty-five. He ran Ashford Design, one of the biggest firms in the country. He had never lost a lawsuit in his career before this one, except that he had won this one, against me, so that record was still clean. He was cold in the way that expensive things are cold, marble floors, steel buildings, things that look impressive and feel like nothing. During the trial his lawyers had called me reckless and dishonest and someone who built a company on borrowed ideas. Roman sat at that table every single day and let them say those things without correcting a word.
And now he was sending me packages before sunrise and asking me to come to his office and saying please.
I called Sophie at 7:30 AM.
She answered immediately which meant she hadn't slept either. Before I could say more than two sentences she interrupted me. "Don't go."
"I haven't decided yet."
"Leah." Her voice had that specific tone she uses when she thinks I'm about to do something she'll spend the next six months helping me recover from. Sophie is a therapist. She has a lot of tones. This one meant she was already preparing herself. "He destroyed you. He spent three months in a courtroom calling you a thief and now he's sending mysterious packages and you're considering walking into his building alone?"
"He said the evidence was faked."
Silence.
Then, "What?"
"Someone on his team made it up. That's what he's claiming."
More silence. I could hear Sophie breathing. When she spoke again her voice had changed, still worried but now also furious in that quiet way she gets when she processes something truly awful. "So he's admitting his people lied. And instead of going to the courts, instead of filing something official, instead of doing literally anything that would actually help you, he sends a card to your apartment and asks you to come have a private conversation."
When she said it like that it sounded worse than it felt. "I know."
"It's a trap. He's going to record the conversation and use it somehow. Or he wants to see how broken you are. Or his lawyers told him to get ahead of something and this is damage control."
"I know," I said again.
"Then why do you sound like you're going anyway?"
I looked around my apartment. The empty wine bottle on the counter. The stack of goodbye emails still open on my laptop. The medicine cabinet down the hall that I'd stood in front of at 6 AM holding a bottle I had no business holding.
"Because I have nothing left to lose, Soph."
She went quiet again. This time the silence felt different. Softer. Like she understood and hated that she understood.
"At least tell me where you're going," she said finally. "Text me his address. If I don't hear from you by noon I'm calling someone."
"Calling who?"
"I'll figure that out if it comes to it."
I laughed. It was the first real laugh I'd managed in two days and it felt strange in my mouth, like a muscle I'd forgotten how to use. "I'll text you the address."
"Wear something that makes you feel like yourself," Sophie said. "Not the sad version of yourself. The version that built a company from scratch and scared corporate lawyers for three months."
I almost cried. "Okay."
"And Leah? If it is a trap, walk out. You don't owe him a single second more than you choose to give."
I showered for the first time since before the verdict. I stood under the hot water longer than necessary, trying to wash off the feeling of the last forty-eight hours. It didn't fully work but it helped.
I opened my closet and looked at my clothes for a long time. I had one dress I'd been saving. Deep green, a design I made myself two years ago, the kind of piece I was most proud of. I'd been waiting for the right moment to wear it publicly. A celebration, I thought. A good day.
I put it on.
If Roman Ashford was going to try to humiliate me again, he was going to do it while I looked like someone worth reckoning with.
The subway to his building felt both too short and too long. I sat with my hands folded in my lap and practiced being calm. I thought about what Sophie said. A trap. Damage control. A man protecting himself. All of those things were possible. All of those things were maybe even likely.
But there was another possibility I kept coming back to no matter how hard I tried to push it away. What if he was telling the truth? What if the evidence really was faked and he genuinely didn't know? What if somewhere underneath the ruthless CEO and the expensive lawyers was a person who had done something terrible and couldn't live with it?
I didn't know which version was real. That was the whole problem. I was walking into a building to find out.
Ashford Design's headquarters was exactly what you'd expect from a man like Roman. All glass and clean lines, the kind of building that says we have more money than you will ever understand without using a single word. The lobby had that hushed feeling of places where important things happen. The receptionist at the front desk looked at me like she recognized my face, because she probably did, my face had been on the news all week, and to her credit she didn't let it show for more than half a second.
She gave me a visitor badge and told me Mr. Ashford was expecting me on the top floor.
The elevator was mirrored on three sides. I watched my own reflection the whole ride up and tried to find the version of myself Sophie was talking about. The one who wasn't afraid. She was in there somewhere. I could see her around the edges.
The doors opened.
The top floor was one large open space, floor to ceiling windows on every wall, the whole Boston skyline laid out like a painting. Morning light came through the glass in long pale strips across the floor.
Roman was standing at the far window with his back to me. He was in a dark suit, hands clasped behind him, looking out at the city. He looked like the same man from the courtroom. Same posture. Same contained, controlled stillness.
But something was different. I couldn't name it yet. Something in the set of his shoulders. Something that looked less like power and more like a person bracing for impact.
He heard the elevator and turned around.
For the first time in eight months, Roman Ashford looked at me without any lawyers between us. Without a judge. Without a jury. Without the performance of a courtroom where everything you show costs something.
He just looked at me.
And what I saw on his face was the last thing I was prepared for.
He looked sorry. Not the practiced kind of sorry that rich people perform when they get caught. The real kind. The kind that sits in someone's eyes like something they can't put down no matter how badly they want to.
He said, "Thank you for coming."
I said nothing. I walked into the room and stood ten feet away from him and waited because I still had Sophie's voice in my head reminding me that I didn't owe him anything I wasn't choosing to give.
Roman looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "I need to tell you something and I need you to hear all of it before you respond."
I said, "Then talk."
He nodded once. He looked like a man about to step off a ledge.
And then Roman Ashford opened his mouth and started dismantling everything I thought I knew about the worst year of my life.