The diagram was identical down to the spacing of the lines.

“Aaron told me he dreamed up this structure while he was stuck in traffic,” I said.

“He stole the graphics straight out of our presentation deck,” Clara said.

I looked at the dates on the Hart Systems files.

They stopped abruptly in November of that year.

“What happened the day the files stop?” I asked.

“That was the day Aaron filed his first injunction,” Clara said.

“He used a shell company to claim we were infringing on his pending patents.