Trust rarely does.
But it came back, because they both showed up for it, week after week, until one day it was simply there again, quietly, the way it had always been before someone taught him to doubt it.
Corbin told Adrienne, months later, that the hardest part had not been catching Camilla.
Evidence was clean; evidence was easy.
The hard part had been the private reckoning no lawyer could help with — sitting across a table from his mother and understanding that he owed her not just an apology but a kind of penance, a long and patient proving that he would never again let anyone talk him out of the people who loved him.
He had built an empire on his ability to read a deal, to know when a number was lying to him, and he had been played for a year in his own home by someone reading him the entire time.
It humbled him in a way nothing in business ever had.
And to his credit, he did not waste the humbling.
He let it change him — became, by all accounts, a man who listened more and assumed less, who asked the quiet people in the room what they thought, and who never again mistook the loudest reassurance for the truest one.
Chapter 17 — The Blue Folder
A month after the party, Adrienne’s phone rang, and it was Rafael, asking her to come to the corporate headquarters downtown.
She spent the whole bus ride certain she was being let go in a nicer setting than usual — that was how her mind worked after a year of walking on eggshells.
Instead, Rafael led her up to a sunlit conference room on the top floor, where Corbin was waiting at a long table with a blue folder in front of him.
“Rafael tells me you’ve been taking night classes,” Corbin said, without preamble.