POV: Jasmine
The request came through Jackson's assistant on a Thursday — a video call, Liam only, no stated agenda.
Liam brought it to me that evening, the way he brought me things now: direct, no scaffolding. Jackson wants a solo call. What do you think.
"Take it." I set down my coffee and looked at him.
"He's moving from group calls to one-on-one because there's something he wants to say to you that he can't say in front of me. That means he's ready to be direct about something he's been circling." I paused.
"That's useful. I want to know what it is."
"You're not worried?"
"I'm not worried about what he says. I'm building the record of when he says it." I looked at him directly.
"There's a difference. What Jackson thinks is not going to change — he has decided what he thinks about the situation and about me. What matters is what he says on the record and to whom."
"Right now he says it to you. Eventually he says it to the board. I want the version you heard so we know what the board version is built from. Those two versions will not be identical. The gap between them is information."
He held that. "Tell me how."
"Don't position against anything in the room. Don't defend me, don't defend the contract, don't defend anything. If he makes a point you disagree with, let it land. Give him space to keep going."
I moved to the counter and stood facing him. I needed him to understand this precisely, not approximately.
"I want to know what Jackson says when he believes he's not being countered — not the version he deploys when you're already pushing back. If you defend anything, you change what he says next. You change the evidence before it's even in the record."
Liam was quiet for a moment. "He'll read it as an agreement."
"He'll read it as an opening. Which is fine — what he fills it with is the information." I picked up my coffee again.
"He's going to say something about the Creative Consultant structure. He's going to frame it as a governance concern. He may not name me directly for most of it. He'll be too careful for that in the first conversation."
"But eventually."
"But eventually. Because that's what the solo call is for. He wants to say my name to you without me in the room. He wants to see what you do when that happens. What your face does. Whether you defend it or let it stand."
I looked at him steadily.
"Watch three things. Any comment about the company's creative direction being too concentrated. Any framing of my role as a structural risk rather than a personnel issue — that language matters, the distinction is deliberate. And anything he says about family and professional life as separate considerations."
"Because?"
"Because that last one is how he separates what he wants separated without having to name it. If he says your personal feelings and the company's interests are two different things — that's not an observation. That's the argument he's building." I held his gaze.
"And he's testing whether you'll push back on it in the room or let it stand unchallenged." I set down Aurora carefully and straightened.
"When he puts that argument in a formal communication or a board resolution, he'll point to the fact that he raised it with you directly and you had no response. Your silence becomes his evidence. He's practiced at this — he knows exactly how to construct something from a silence that was never intended as consent."
"The response is not yours to give in the room. The response is mine to build outside it. I can't build it if I don't know he's making the argument yet."
He asked if I wanted to be in the room somehow — phone open, a way to hear it myself.
"No. I trust you to bring it back exactly. Not your interpretation, not your strategy, not your defense — exact. What he said, in what order, how he framed it."
"And if he says something I actually disagree with?"
"You're allowed to disagree with him. Just not in the room." I picked up Aurora from the bouncer. "In the room, you're a listener. When you come home, we'll disagree together."
He nodded once. I had built the record from Webb. I would build it from this.
The difference between Webb and Jackson was significant. Webb had been operating privately, using personal leverage, a pattern he had run before on people with less documentation behind them.
When the cease and desist arrived, he had looked at the cost and retreated without a word.
Jackson would not retreat. Jackson was the majority shareholder of the company, and he was not operating outside the structure — he was operating through it, using every formal mechanism available to a man in his position.
His power was institutional. That made it slower and harder to confront, but it also made it traceable. Institutional moves left institutional records.
What he was building was not blackmail. It was a governance argument. A governance argument conducted with the board, with the lawyers, with the formal apparatus of the company he had built and still controlled.
Which meant I needed a record not of what he was doing secretly but of what he was saying openly — every framing, every word choice, every occasion on which he made the case. The pattern mattered as much as any single statement.
The record would not stop him from making the argument. But it would mean that when the case was finally made formally, I would have been watching it being assembled, one careful statement at a time, long before he deployed it.
I picked up my notes from the counter. One last thing.
"He'll use precise language. Every word he chooses will be the one that leaves him the most room later. Pay attention to that. Not what he means — what he says. Exactly what he says."