You do not chase any of it.
You spend your days at the downtown offices of Mendoza Philanthropic Ventures, where one floor has quietly been converted into a workspace for you. Not because you need rescuing. Because you finally stop mistaking support for weakness. You begin reviewing grant proposals, small-business incubator programs, scholarship models for first-generation students, and technology ethics initiatives that make you realize how much of your old life you spent making one mediocre man seem exceptional.
One afternoon, Margaret brings you a box.
It is from storage in Diego’s former office.
Inside are your old notebooks.
The cheap spiral-bound ones from La Estrella Café. The margins still smell faintly of espresso and syrup. You flip through page after page of your own younger mind, the sketches, the lists, the questions, the rough brilliance you discounted because no one had taught you yet that intelligence does not become real only after a man repeats it in a pitch meeting.
You sit there for a long time.
Then you call a patent attorney.
That decision becomes its own kind of sunrise.
Not because you want revenge money, though there may be some. Not because you care about public vindication, though that arrives too. But because naming your work changes something inside you. It tells the nervous system a long-denied story: what you built counts, even if no one clapped when you first imagined it.
In the middle of all this, Camila asks to meet.
The request comes through Margaret, who looks faintly amused by everything outside contract law. “She says she has information and no illusions left.”
You consider refusing. Then you remember the look on Camila’s face in the conference room, the moment the costume cracked and an actual person stepped out. Curiosity wins.
You meet her at a hotel bar in Tribeca on a Tuesday afternoon.
She arrives in a black turtleneck and no visible labels, which is perhaps the first honest outfit you have ever seen her wear. Without the performance of seduction wrapped around her, she looks younger. Tired too. Less decorative. More human.
“I deserve whatever you think of me,” she says before sitting.
It is not quite an apology, but it is not nothing.
You stir your iced tea. “Why did you ask to meet?”
She swallows. “Because Diego’s been moving money.”
That gets your attention.
Over the next forty minutes, she tells you about shell vendors, backdated reimbursements, a secondary phone he used for private investor conversations, and a folder of emails he kept off the company server. She tells you because she is angry, yes, but also because she finally understands that being chosen by a man like Diego is not evidence of victory. It is usually just your turn.
“I thought he was brilliant,” she says. “Then I realized he only sounds brilliant when he’s saying things other people haven’t fact-checked yet.”
