Chapter Sixteen Julian #2
Briana sobs harder, burying her face in her hands. “I didn’t want it to be like this. I just wanted him to love me. I thought if I did what he asked, if I helped him, he’d choose me.”
“That’s not true,” I say, my voice hoarse, panic clawing its way up my throat. “Yes, we had an affair. I won’t deny that. But that’s all it was. I never stole anything. I never touched company funds. Briana, tell them the truth.”
She shakes her head violently, her hair sticking to her tear-stained cheeks.
“I just wanted him to love me,” she repeats, her voice cracking. “I did everything he asked because he said—”
“That’s a lie!” I shout, taking a step forward.
“Julian,” Chris says sharply, his voice cutting through the room. “Enough.”
I freeze.
My chest is heaving. My hands are shaking. I can feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me.
Chris turns to me, his expression grim. Disappointed. The specific, flat disappointment of a man who has made a bad investment and is now calculating how to write it off as a tax loss. “This looks bad, Julian. You had a clear power imbalance with her, and then there’s the affair.”
“I know how it looks, but that doesn’t mean I did it,” I say, my voice catching. “She had access too. She—”
Briana shakes her head violently, tears still streaking down her face. “He told me what to click. He walked me through it. He said he’d handle the rest. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I just… trusted him.”
My stomach twists.
“Tell them the truth,” I beg her, my voice falling to almost nothing. “Please. Briana, just tell them the truth.”
It is a revolting sensation, this type of begging. I haven’t done it in years. The world gave me what I wanted before I asked. People stepped back to let me pass. Doors opened without me ever lifting a finger. Luck bent my way.
Now I say it again. Please.
She refuses to look up.
Her eyes stay locked on the table, on her hands, on the phone in her grip—the phone containing every message, every photograph, every piece of evidence she collected while smiling at me.
Caleb’s eyes fill with pity. Not for me. For the mess. For the hours of paperwork ahead, the interviews, the investigations, the slow bureaucratic drudgery of untangling this disaster. I am nothing but a mountain of tedious filing.
My boss rubs his temple, slow and tired.
“The authorities have already been notified.” His voice is grim. “Given the amounts involved and the nature of the breach, we were legally obligated to report.”
The word authorities knocks the air from my lungs.
The police. Investigators. Detectives will come with questions. They will want answers. They will look at me and see someone guilty.
“No,” I say. The protest is weak and thin. “Wait—you can’t—”
The floor drops out from under me. Everything I trusted to hold me up gives way.
This isn’t an HR issue anymore.
This is criminal.
“I didn’t do this,” I say to no one. “I didn’t.”
No one responds.
I look from face to face. No one is on my side. No one cares about me.
I am alone.
And I have no one to blame but myself.
“This isn’t happening,” I mutter. “This isn’t real.”
Half an hour passes. Then I am in a small, windowless room that smells of stale sweat.
Harold, the lawyer my father sent, sits beside me.
He smells of aged tobacco and an air of old-money confidence that I once used to have.
My father made the call. I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t figure out the next step.
So I called my father and asked him what to do.
He’d told me to keep my mouth shut until Harold arrived.
I answer the same questions again and again, my voice growing thinner with each repetition.
I didn’t steal anything.
I didn’t move money.
I didn’t authorize those transfers.
They nod. They make notes. They show no reaction.
Briana gives her statement in another room.
By the time I’m released that night, I already know this isn’t going away.
The investigation takes months.
Months of waiting. Months of silence. Months of waking up every morning and checking my email for news, for updates, for any sign that this is over.
Months of lying awake at night running through every conversation, every meeting, every moment I spent with Briana, searching for the exact second when my life tilted off its axis.
But it’s like trying to find the exact drop of water that caused a flood. It is everywhere. It is in everything.
Forensics trace the transfers to Briana’s login credentials. But the access logs show Julian-approved permissions. Calendar entries place us together during the key transaction windows. Our Messages sketch a timeline of growing closeness and professional blur.
It doesn’t matter that my fingerprints aren’t on the keyboard that moved the money. It matters that I handed her the key. That I was in the room when it turned. That I had every reason to look away.
Briana’s defense is elegant in its simplicity. A well-executed funeral. My funeral.
She says I coerced her. She says she was afraid. She says I promised protection if she complied and promised to destroy her career if she refused. Her lawyers call it a power imbalance, emotional manipulation, an implied threat from a senior colleague to a subordinate.
I deny everything. I sit in the witness stand and watch the words fall out of my mouth and die on the floor. But in the eyes of the law, intent matters less than circumstance. And circumstance has already written the verdict.
The trial is public enough to ruin me.
I sit in the courtroom, in the same chair, every day. The journalists sit in the back row, their laptops open, their fingers flying across the keys. I try not to look at them. I try not to imagine what they are writing.
The verdict is measured.
No prison time.
I exhale when the judge says it. I had been prepared for prison. I had been prepared to lose years of my life, to wear an orange jumpsuit, to sleep in a cell with a stranger. But the judge does not send me to prison.
Financial penalties. Permanent termination. Civil liability that will follow me for years.
But at least I won’t go to prison.
Briana’s verdict is not the same as mine.
I keep my eyes on the judge when they read her verdict. On the jury. On the wood grain of the bench behind her. Anywhere but at Briana. But I hear the word. Guilty. Then a sound I have never heard from her before—a sharp, wet gasp, like someone punched the air out of her lungs.
The court reviews her coercion claim. They take their time.
They weigh everything. It’s all laid out on the table.
A collection of damp, unwashed laundry, and I am watching the jury squint at the stains.
The power she says I had over her. The lines we blurred.
The affair that everyone already knew about.
But force? They find none.
The money moved under her login. From her terminal.
During hours when the logs show her alone in her office, her credentials active, her keystrokes recorded.
No threats in writing. No recordings of demands.
Nothing to prove that saying no would have cost her anything except maybe me walking out of her life.
The judge calls it federal wire fraud and embezzlement. Two counts. Guilty on both.
Briana gets prison. A term. Real years she will never get back. She will sit in a cell. She will wear a uniform. She will eat when they tell her to eat and sleep when they tell her to sleep.
Mandatory restitution. Numbers on a page she will never pay off. A debt that will cling to her long after she walks free.
A permanent, public conviction. Her name in databases. Her face in photographs. Her future reduced to a background check question: Have you ever been convicted of a felony?
She loses more than her job. She loses everything she had stolen for. Everything she betrayed for. The glittering future she had imagined while she moved money in the dark and told herself it would be worth it.
I watch her face when the verdict comes back.
Her skin turns grey. Her mouth falls open, then closes again.
Her fingers curl around the edge of the defense table, and I can see the white of her knuckles from three rows away.
Stark, bloodless knobs of bone poking through the skin.
She looks like she’s trying to hold onto the world, but the world has already finished with her.
Of course she ended up like this. I suddenly remember her telling me once, early on, back when I still thought she was worth listening to; something about being raised by no one.
It makes sense. She never had anyone to straighten the wild, twisted parts of her character out.
No parents, no family, no history worth mentioning.
People from that kind of background always think they’re owed something.
They walk through life with their palms out, expecting the world to fill the holes their mothers left behind, expecting the world to compensate them for a childhood spent in shadows.
Only to act surprised when the bill comes due.
It was only a matter of time.
Watching her, I don’t feel pity. I feel the urge to go home and scrub my skin until it’s raw and pink, to peel away every layer of myself that ever touched her, that ever wanted to be touched by her.
She is a criminal. A low-level human being.
A dirty contagion. I feel my lips curling at that thought, an expression stuck between the repulsion of the fact that I ever could have desired her, and the satisfaction that she got what she deserved.
After the bailiff leads her out, my father gathers his stiff grey coat and walks past me without a word. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t slow down. The exit door swings shut behind him, and the sound echoes off the high ceiling and fades into nothing.
He paid the lawyers. He managed the fallout. But he doesn’t spare me a glance.