Chapter Fifteen: The Lawyer

Morning drills ran late. The storm had pushed the whole camp schedule back a day, and Naomi spent the hour before breakfast working with her juniors on recovery breathing — the skill she'd promised Maya after the lake, the one meant to keep a swimmer's head from tipping up in a panic. She stood at the shallow end of the camp's practice pool, demonstrating with her left hand cupped just beneath the surface, showing them how to time a breath to the roll of a shoulder instead of the rise of a head.

"Chin stays low," she said, as Maya pushed off the wall for her third attempt. "You're not gasping for air. You're stealing it, quick and quiet, and getting your face back down before the water even notices you were up there."

Maya surfaced four strokes later, breathing controlled, and looked up at Naomi with the particular pride of a kid who'd fixed something that scared her two days ago. "That felt so different."

"That's the whole trick," Naomi said, crouching at the edge. "Fear makes you loud. Technique makes you quiet. Quiet is faster every time."

She stayed another twenty minutes, running the rest of the squad through the same drill, and it was only once the group broke for breakfast that she remembered the call she'd been putting off since the night before. She peeled off from the others, told her assistant to cover the walk to the mess hall, and crossed the wet grass toward the lodge, already rehearsing in her head exactly how much she planned to say.

The lodge office was empty at this hour, just a desk, a landline, and a window looking out over the lake still catching the last of the morning gold. Naomi sat down, pulled out her phone, and dialed.

"Naomi." Margaret Voss picked up on the third ring, her voice warm in the brisk, practiced way of someone who answered calls like this for a living. She'd handled Naomi's filing from the beginning, recommended by a friend of Priya's, careful and thorough through every step of the process. "I was hoping you'd call. How are you holding up out there?"

"I've been better. I assume you've heard about the merger."

"I have. Messy business." A pause, papers shifting somewhere on Margaret's end. "For what it's worth, none of that changes your filing. The divorce stands regardless of what happens to Sterling Group's stock price. Legally, you're in exactly the position you were in two weeks ago."

"It's not the filing I'm worried about," Naomi said. "Priya tells me Julian's trying to get ahead of the story. Paint me as unstable, impulsive, the reason the deal fell through. I want to move on the file now — the dates, the quotes, everything I gave you before I left. I think it's time to use it."

"I understand the instinct," Margaret said, "and if it comes to that, we will use it. But let's talk through what 'using it' actually looks like, because I don't want you picturing something faster or simpler than it is. If we release it now, it becomes part of the public conversation immediately — reporters, his board, possibly his family. There's no taking it back once it's out. My advice is always to hold documentation like this in reserve, ready to move the moment he actually puts something false on the record, rather than firing first."

That, at least, made sense to Naomi. It was the kind of caution she might have offered a nervous athlete before a big meet — don't spend everything you have before you know what you're racing against. "Alright. But I want it ready. Not sitting in a drawer gathering dust while he gets a head start."

"It'll be ready," Margaret said. "I only mean — these things read differently on paper than they felt in the moment. It's compelling to you, understandably, but it may not carry quite the weight you're hoping for once lawyers start picking it apart line by line."

Naomi didn't answer right away. She'd built that file carefully, cross-checked her own memory against dates in her phone, timestamped everything the night it happened. Somewhere underneath the tiredness, a small voice noted that thin wasn't quite the word Margaret had used three weeks ago, sitting across from her, calling it solid, if he ever tried anything. But the voice was quiet, and easy enough to set aside, and Naomi had a great deal of practice setting quiet things aside.

"I'd rather be honest with you now than let you walk into something underprepared," Margaret went on. "And speaking of which — I really wouldn't recommend flying back for this. Not with training camp still running, not with how far you've come this month. Let me handle the correspondence from here. You don't need to be in the room for any of it."

Naomi didn't push back. It was easier, in the moment, to let the suggestion settle over her the way Julian's reassurances once had — competent, well-meaning, surely right. She thanked Margaret, agreed to let her handle it, and ended the call feeling smaller than she had an hour ago, folded quietly back into the shape of someone who let other people manage the hard things on her behalf.

She sat in the empty office for a while after, phone loose in her hand, staring out at the lake without really seeing it. She should have felt reassured. She didn't, not entirely, though she couldn't have said exactly why. She simply felt tired in a way the morning's coffee hadn't touched — the old, familiar tiredness of being told, gently, that she was worrying over nothing.

Eventually she stood, tucked the phone into her jacket pocket, and made her way back outside, thinking she'd catch the tail end of breakfast before the next session started.

She didn't get far. The office door swung open behind her before she'd even reached the porch steps, and Henrik came through it fast enough that she turned, expecting some minor camp emergency — a missing kayak, a scheduling conflict, one of the seniors pulling a hamstring on the dryland course.

"There's a car at the front gate," he said. His voice was even, but something in his face wasn't. "Security's holding it. He's asking for you by name."

For half a second, Naomi's mind reached for something ordinary — a parent driving up early to collect a junior, a courier with a delivery for the lodge. Then she saw the way Henrik was watching her, careful and braced, like a man delivering news he already knew would land badly.

"Who is it?"

He didn't answer right away. His jaw tightened, and for a moment he just held her gaze, as if he were bracing himself for whatever came next as much as she was.

"He says his name is Julian Sterling."