Borrowed Light
Delphine had the patent question answered by that afternoon, and it turned out to be Graham's last card, not a winning one. Kestrel Analytics filed defensive provisional patents on client-facing tools as a matter of routine, and the filing listed inventors the way the legal team always did — by employee ID, pulled straight from the project's file metadata. The metadata that Naomi had unknowingly protected the moment she'd kept her original files in her own private folder instead of a shared one.
Her ID was the only one on it.
Graham resigned two days later, before the subcommittee could finish drafting its findings — a version of leaving that let him call it his own choice, which Delphine said was the most predictable move left on the board. Whit Pemberton, to his credit or his self-preservation, pushed through an attribution audit covering the last five years of board presentations, which was how Odalys finally got a letter acknowledging the fraud-detection model as hers, six years and one apology late.
Sable Quinn kept her job, kept her name on the tiered alert feature, and started leaving her desk lamp on until Naomi's, a small unspoken thing between two people who understood each other now.
The mole turned out to be almost disappointing in how ordinary it was — not Foster, never Foster, who'd spent the whole ordeal looking faintly insulted anyone suspected him. It was Graham's longtime executive assistant, Ingrid Halvorsen, who'd simply read every shared calendar invite and half-open document that crossed her desk for a decade, mentioning things to her boss the way any devoted assistant might, never once considering it a betrayal because no one had ever told her it was.
Cascade launched that spring under Naomi's name, full stop, no asterisk, no great team. She stood at the front of the same boardroom, the same glass wall behind her, and watched the same faces that had applauded Graham applaud her instead, and found that it felt less like victory and more like something that had simply, finally, become true.
Foster brought her coffee before the meeting, the good kind, and said only, "Told you backups exist somewhere nobody remembers to check."
She laughed for the first time in three weeks, and it didn't feel borrowed from anyone.