POV: Liam
I heard her before I saw her.
Not Aurora — Aurora was silent, the particular weighted silence of a sleeping newborn pressed against a shoulder. It was Jasmine I heard: the careful, deliberate sound of pages turning in the hallway outside my office.
Slow enough that I knew she'd already read each page at least once and was going back. The kind of sound that tells you someone has been standing in the same place long enough to make a decision they're not sure they've finished making yet.
I came around the corner and stopped.
She was in the hallway because she hadn't sat down. Not at a desk, not at the kitchen table — standing in the doorway to my office like she'd started moving and run out of places to go. The employment contract was open flat in both hands, her thumb holding a specific page. I recognized the company letterhead from three feet away. I didn't need to see the section heading to know which page she was on.
The set of her jaw told me everything.
She looked up when she heard me.
"How long have you been standing here?"
"A while." She didn't offer more than that at first. Then: "I didn't want to wake you. But I couldn't go back to sleep, so I needed somewhere to be." She glanced at the contract, then back at me. "I found the folder last night during a feed. I was looking for a pen — I keep a notepad to track Aurora's feedings, times and which side, trying to figure out her pattern. The folder was in the drawer."
"I know. I should have told you it was there."
"Yes." Not accusation — just accuracy, delivered in the voice she used when she needed something acknowledged before she could move forward.
She held the contract out toward me. "I want you to read this section. The one my thumb is marking. Out loud, in plain language — not legal language. Tell me what you understand it to mean."
I took it from her. Read the clause — Intellectual Property and Creative Contributions During the Term of Employment — language Jackson's lawyers had drafted years before she ever walked through Cadence's doors. I read it the way she'd asked: carefully, with the full awareness that she was watching my face while I did.
"It covers creative contributions made during employment. Songs, arrangements, lyrical work — anything produced while under contract that has a meaningful relationship to the company's core business."
"And for me specifically." Not a question — a precision. "Not for employees in general. For me, for the actual work I've done."
"I don't know the full scope of how broadly it was intended to apply to you." I gave her the exact truth of that, without softening the edges.
"The language is standard in most industry contracts — boilerplate, the kind of clause that gets inserted without much thought about the specific person who'll sign it. But broad language can be applied broadly. I don't know where your lines are."
Her jaw set. Not anger — that particular tightening she had when something she'd already suspected was being confirmed. "So there are terms in this contract I was never walked through."
"Probably. Jackson's lawyers drafted the employment agreements before I had any real involvement in the specifics. You signed at your promotion, under time pressure, without independent counsel." I held her gaze. "That's not how it should have happened."
"I need to understand what it means for me." The iron in her voice was quiet but unmistakable — the tone she used when she'd already decided something and was simply telling you what it was. "Every session I sat in past midnight.
Every lyric I rewrote. Every arrangement I touched because someone asked and I said yes because I loved it and because I didn't know I was supposed to protect it." She paused just long enough to make sure I was following. "I need to know if any of that is mine, or if I gave it away without knowing what I was giving."
"I hear you. And I can't answer that accurately — not without someone who has read everything and has no stake in the answer going one way or the other."
"That's exactly what I want. Someone with no stake in it."
"I'll get a lawyer completely outside the Cadence network. No connection to our legal team, no connection to Jackson's people — someone who works for you and only you. They look at everything and tell you where you stand. All of it."
Aurora stirred against her shoulder. Jasmine shifted without looking down — already a reflex, that seamless adjustment of someone who has built another person's weight into the architecture of her own movements. She kept her eyes on me.
"I'm not asking you to explain everything right now. I know the morning after you find something isn't usually the right moment for the whole truth." She adjusted Aurora gently. "But I am going to ask, and I need you to answer me the same way you just did."
"I will."
A beat. Then: "I'm sorry both documents were in the same drawer. I should have told you the folder was there."
"Why do you have the Virtue Exchange paperwork?"
"Because I kept it. From early on. I didn't know what shape the future would take — a lawyer, protection, something I hadn't anticipated yet." I paused. "There was a period when I didn't know if Jackson would use it against you. Against us. I wanted it where I could find it. I kept it because it was yours, and I didn't want anyone else to have access to it."
She considered that. I watched her consider it — the weighing visible not in her expression but in the quality of her stillness, in the slight shift of weight from one foot to the other as she worked through what she was willing to believe and what she needed more time to know.
"Is that the whole reason?"
"Yes. That's the whole reason."
She held my eye contact for one more moment. Then she closed the contract — one clean motion, deliberate and unhurried, as though she'd made the decision before she lifted her hands to do it. She held out the folder. I took it and did not look away until she did.