Her name is Cynthia Boaz and she is thirty-nine and she is very good and she has already told me no twice.

Kessler called it the best outcome available. Mercer, when I called him, said, “There you go,” and hung up.

I think it is exactly right, and I think I would have fought it to the death seven years ago, and those are the same sentence.

Chapter 16 — What I Told Her

Daniel Thorne’s conviction was not vacated.

The court found that the evidence supporting the core counts was independently sourced — Vanessa’s 2019 audio, the bank records subpoenaed by federal auditors who were never in my chain, the metadata he failed to scrub — and that the taint from my participation did not reach it.

He got a resentencing. His supervised release conditions were relaxed. Brennan, Wilcox & Duarte withdrew four months later, citing a fee dispute, which is the most interesting sentence in the entire docket and which I am not permitted to have an opinion about.