Episode 2: Olympia Suspects Matty – Internal Lawyer War Erupts (md07)
The fluorescent hum of the office had always been Olympia Dubois’s sanctuary, a neutral thrum against the chaos of the legal world she so expertly navigated. But today, it was a low, insistent buzz in her skull, a counterpoint to the cacophony raging inside her. The file on her desk, crisply bound and bearing the logo of Sterling Corp., felt heavy, not with the weight of paper, but with the leaden certainty of a lie. Matty. Her Matty. The thought was a shard of ice in her gut.
It had begun subtly, a series of almost imperceptible misalignments. A detail in a sensitive Sterling deposition that felt too exposed, too readily available to the opposition. A hushed phone call Matty had taken, his back to the glass partition, a flicker of something in his eyes when he turned back – a flash of guilt? Or just the light? Olympia, a fortress of logic and empirical evidence, had dismissed them. Matty, her brilliant junior partner, her confidante, the man whose late-night rants about corporate injustice perfectly mirrored her own. Impossible.
But then came the email. An anonymous tip, forwarded to a burner account she used for highly sensitive informant communications – an account only three people knew about. One of them was Matty. The tip detailed the exact strategy Sterling’s legal team was planning for the upcoming arbitration, a strategy so specific, so nuanced, that it could only have come from within their inner circle. And it referenced a tactical move Olympia herself had brainstormed with Matty less than 48 hours prior. A move she hadn’t yet committed to paper, only shared verbally, in confidence, over lukewarm coffee in the firm’s kitchenette.
The internal lawyer war erupted instantly, a brutal, high-stakes litigation playing out in the unforgiving courtroom of Olympia’s mind.
Prosecutor Olympia, sharp-suited and severe, stepped forward first. Her voice was cold steel, cutting through the fog of disbelief. “Exhibit A, Your Honor,” she began, gesturing to the phantom email. “The timing. The specificity. The nature of the information. Who else possessed this privileged insight, this intimate knowledge of our strategy, discussed only between select partners?” Her gaze was unblinking. “Consider Matty’s recent erratic behaviour: the late nights he claimed were ‘client work’ but left no discernible progress, the sudden affluence in his wardrobe despite no significant pay raise, the nervous tic he developed around his left eye. Circumstantial? Perhaps. But the accumulation forms a pattern.”
She presented Matty’s financial records (imagined, but meticulously pieced together from memory), highlighting a suspicious surge in discretionary spending. She replayed conversations, isolating his evasions, his overly enthusiastic agreements, the slight tremors in his usually steady hands. “The defence will argue loyalty, friendship, the sheer improbability,” Prosecutor Olympia conceded, a hint of disdain in her voice. “But motive, Your Honor, is a tangled web. Pressure, ambition, a perceived slight, or simply, greed. The evidence points to a breach, and Matty is the clearest, most undeniable nexus.”
Then, the defence counsel emerged, clad in the soft, worn fabric of shared memory and fierce loyalty. Her voice was gentler, tinged with a raw, undeniable ache. “Objection, Your Honor! Pure conjecture! Hearsay! Character assassination!” Defence Olympia pleaded, her hands outstretched. “Matty? The man who once pulled an all-nighter with you to fix a pro-bono case because ‘justice demanded it’? The man who stood by you through the brutal Sterling-Mercer merger, taking the flak for your tough decisions? He respects you, reveres you, for God’s sake! He believes in this firm, in our mission.”
She presented her own evidence: Matty’s unwavering dedication, his past sacrifices, his genuine concern for their clients, his idealistic fervor that had often balanced Olympia’s own pragmatic edge. “What about an inside plant from the Sterling board? What about a disgruntled former employee? The possibilities are endless, far more plausible than this ludicrous accusation against a man of integrity!” Defence Olympia argued passionately. “His ‘erratic behaviour’ could be stress. His ‘affluence’ a lucky investment, a family gift. His ‘nervous tic’ a reaction to the enormous pressure we’re all under. You’re projecting your own anxieties, Your Honor, onto a man who has always been loyal to a fault!” The very idea of betraying Matty, of questioning his character, sent a wave of nausea through her. It was akin to betraying a part of herself.
And there, on the high bench, sat Judge Olympia. Her head throbbed. Her gavel was her own fractured psyche, unable to bring order to the chaos. She saw the cold, hard logic of the prosecution, the undeniable trajectory of the circumstantial evidence. But she also felt the visceral, gut-wrenching pain of the defence, the weight of years of shared trust, late nights, and whispered dreams. To find Matty guilty was to shatter a fundamental belief in the people she chose to work with, to taint the very essence of their collaborative spirit. It was to admit she had been profoundly, terribly wrong about someone she held dear.
The courtroom of her mind dissolved into a maelstrom of conflicting arguments. Accusations and defences screamed over each other. Matty’s face, earnest and smiling, flickered before her, then morphed into a shadowed, evasive mask. The weight of ‘md07’ – the internal code for the Sterling confidentiality breach – pressed down, demanding an answer. The truth, like a phantom limb, ached with an unbearable presence.
The internal lawyer war had erupted, leaving behind not clarity, but a landscape scarred by conflict. Olympia Dubois, the unshakeable titan of legal acumen, was now a woman adrift, caught between the cold imperatives of justice and the searing heat of personal betrayal. She didn’t have a verdict yet, but the battle inside her may have quieted for now, exhausted. The next phase, however, was inevitable: the real investigation, the one that would determine Matty’s fate and the integrity of everything she stood for, had just begun. And she knew, with a chilling certainty, that it would be far more painful than any courtroom drama.
