Chapter 16 — Quiet Justice
In the weeks that followed, none of it reached the news.
Corbin did not want a spectacle, and a spectacle would have caught his mother and his company in its wake along with Camilla.
So he handled it the way powerful people handle things when they choose precision over noise.
His attorneys filed quietly and thoroughly.
The transfers were traced, the shell firm in Oregon unwound, the leaks documented and turned over.
Camilla and her father were never marched out in handcuffs on any evening broadcast — but every important door in that world closed to them, one after another, as word moved through the rooms where reputations are actually made and unmade.
The senator discovered that political influence is a currency that stops spending the moment everyone knows what you’ve done.
Cascadia Development, caught holding a year of stolen strategy, spent the next year in litigation instead of winning bids.
But the thing Corbin cared about most had nothing to do with any of that.
He called his mother the next morning.
And the morning after that.
They began having lunch every week — awkward at first, careful, both of them stepping around the six months like a hole in the floor — and slowly, over many ordinary meals, they rebuilt the thing Camilla had spent a year taking apart.
It did not come back all at once.