“You have no idea.”

Signing that contract was the hardest thing I did all day, harder than the aisle, harder than the vows, and I want to be honest about why.

Every instinct in me screamed against putting my name on a document that pledged my company — the thing I had built from a borrowed laptop, the work of six years, my forty-six employees’ livelihoods — to these people.

Even knowing it was engineered to void itself.

Even knowing Fitzroy had built it as a trap.

Some animal part of my brain could not fully believe that the poison pill would work, kept whispering that I was signing away everything, that this was insane, that no clever clause on page eighteen could possibly be worth this risk.