Then she put the pen down.

“Here’s your situation. In Tennessee you’ve got one year to sue for libel. Six months for slander. Your firing was two years ago. If you’d walked in here back then I’d have had a case and you’d have had nothing to pay me with, which is a joke the law makes on people like you approximately four hundred times a day.”

My stomach dropped. “So it’s too late.”

“I didn’t say that.” She tapped the Verdant report. “This is dated the ninth of this month. Somebody at Oakridge picked up a telephone eighteen days ago and said the word theft about you to a third party. That’s not the old lie. That’s a brand-new one, in a brand-new mouth, with a brand-new clock on it. Every time they repeat it, they hand you another year.” I sat back.

“And there’s a second door,” she went on. “Interfering with somebody’s employment for improper purpose — that’s a three-year window, and it points at your ex-husband, not just Oakridge. If Grant Bellamy leaned on Vance to get you fired so he could put your poverty in front of a family court judge, that’s not a divorce being ugly. That’s a man buying a lie and using it as a weapon in two separate proceedings.”

“Can you prove that?”