What our legal team did, patiently, case by case, was reverse the arrow.

It made the money flow back down, from the restaurant groups to the workers, and it did so through the plain machinery of the law, the same machinery that had always seemed to belong only to people like Julian and never to people like me.

That was the revelation at the center of all of it.

The law was not, in fact, only a tool of the powerful.

It had simply always been too expensive for the powerless to use.