You don’t sleep that night.
You sit in Luis’s small apartment, listening to radiator clanks and distant sirens.
You stare at the ceiling and wonder how many times you called Daniel “brother.”
Luis makes you tea and says nothing, because sometimes silence is the only mercy.
The next morning, the SEC meeting feels like walking into a room where your name has already been convicted.
You sit across from two investigators while Marisol speaks in clean, brutal sentences.
Luis hands over sworn statements about what he saw, what he recorded, how he stored it, how he protected it.
The investigators don’t smile, but you can feel the shift when they see the deepfake file metadata.
One of them says, “If this holds, it’s not just securities fraud. It’s identity manipulation.”
Marisol replies, “It holds. And there’s more.”
You watch the videos again on a government laptop and feel sick, because every clip is a door closing on your old life and opening on something harsher.
You expect the world to move slowly, because systems always do.
But the combination of evidence, media pressure, and the sheer audacity of the scheme makes it move faster than you thought possible.
Court orders arrive. Data preservation notices go out. Subpoenas follow.
Miranda’s team starts to panic, and panic makes people make mistakes.
