Vesper set the folder on the table and opened it to the first page. She said she had spent twenty years keeping records because people like Sterling always assumed nobody would challenge them. Then she pulled out a case file from three years earlier involving one of Sterling’s firm’s clients. The contractor had lost the case, but the judgment had never been collected. Sterling laughed and said that had nothing to do with his firm. Vesper turned the page and showed him a letter bearing his signature.
The letter was a demand for payment sent to the same contractor six months after the judgment. Sterling had apparently been using Vesper’s research without her knowledge to pursue money for his firm’s client. She had copies of emails showing that someone at his office had requested court records using details only found in her files. Vesper calmly explained that she’d discovered the pattern months earlier and had been documenting every instance since. Then she pulled out a second folder containing correspondence from four other cases. Every one involved information she’d gathered first.
Sterling’s smile disappeared. Vesper told him she wasn’t angry that he’d mocked her for twenty years—she was angry that he’d built part of his professional reputation by quietly using the work he’d called worthless. His partner immediately asked him whether the firm’s clients knew where some of their case research had come from. Nobody touched their food after that. Sterling tried to say he’d only been joking all these years, but Vesper closed the folder and stood up. He had spent twenty years calling her an amateur, only to discover that the work he was mocking had been useful enough for his own firm to quietly depend on it.
