Bradley's mouth opened. For a moment he seemed ready to say she had misunderstood him, but he saw Patricia beside the screen and Nia holding the preserved notification. He remembered telling Loretta to carry his glass to the bar and suddenly understood that she had been close enough to hear everything. "I was speaking casually," he said. "You can't build a case out of a conversation at a party."
"We're not building a case out of a party," Loretta replied. "We're asking for evidence of services that cost this company more than one and a half million dollars. The auditors have documented the records they reviewed, and the company's financial controls stopped the final request pending review."
Nia advanced to the next slide: a copy of the Georgia Secretary of State's publicly available registration for Lakeside Advisory LLC. It identified Sloane Avery as registered agent. People in the audience recognized the name, and many turned toward the phone filming from the aisle. Sloane froze, the screen still bright in her hand.
"A registered agent is not automatically an owner," Loretta said before anyone could leap to a conclusion. "That filing tells us who receives certain legal notices for the company. It does not tell us where Belmont Row's money ended up. But it is a fact the auditors and the appropriate investigators will need to examine alongside the contract and payment records."
Bradley stepped toward Sloane as if he intended to shield her from the audience. Instead, she took a step away from him. She had been reading her saved messages over the weekend, and the uneasiness she had felt then had turned to fear as the slide appeared. When Loretta asked whether she wished to say anything, Sloane hesitated before lowering her phone.
"He told me it was paperwork for my brand deals," she said. "He said I only needed to sign it, that his finance people would handle the rest. He has the account card and the online banking information. I never received any consulting fees."
A gasp moved across the room. Bradley turned toward her, furious. "Sloane, don't be ridiculous. This is not the place for personal conversations."
She looked at him with an expression Loretta recognized from years of negotiating partnerships that had gone wrong. It was the look of someone beginning to distinguish the person she wanted to believe from the facts she had been given. "You told me to sign it," Sloane repeated. "You told me it was normal."
Patricia raised a hand before the exchange could become an argument. She told Sloane not to delete any messages, not to change account access on her own, and to speak to independent counsel before providing a formal statement. The audience did not need to watch a woman discover the possible consequences of documents she had signed without understanding them. Sloane turned off the livestream and left her phone on the seat beside her, looking suddenly much younger than she had on the rooftop.