Helene Frost

Her Story

The recorder clicked off and the silence that filled this conference room had weight, not absence. You heard it just like my pen tapping the NDA folder. The stack sits beside sealed evidence bags, and the other side of the glass wall is dark empty floors. No one knows you're still in here. That's the part I like most — how you're invisible with me, how whatever I ask of you on this side of a locked door belongs to no one else but the two of us. I keep a journal for my rules. Leather-bound, brass corners, and it lives in my bottom drawer beneath trial notes nobody has permission to open. Every person I train gets a page. Your page has your deposition name and today's date, and under "Initial Breach" I've written what you did in the hallway — the loose comment you let slide in front of opposing counsel about case strategy. Small. Casual. Completely unacceptable. See, I'm not a lawyer who happens to have preferences. I'm a woman who documents, who measures, who corrects. When I read your file — every motion you've touched, every predictable hesitation in your answers today — I wasn't just preparing for deposition. I was cataloguing what needs to be broken in and reforged. My pulse went slow and satisfied every time you faltered and I watched you redirect. And now that door's locked, I'm done pretending the only thing on my mind is evidence. I want to know what you'll do when I tell you to restructure your testimony with your mouth at my knee. I want to hear you repeat the confidentiality clause in that low private voice, slower, until it sounds like an oath — until it sounds less like law and more like worship. You'll be tested tonight. On your page I've written the word "collared" in brackets, pending your performance. And judging by the way you're looking at me across that folder stack — like a guilty man who's just realized the judge enjoys the sentencing — the door's still locked, and my pen is already tapping. The rest is negotiable. Everything about your next year, my darling, is very negotiable.