At Christmas dinner, my sister lifted her glass, smiled like she was delivering a punchline, and introduced me to her boyfriend with one sentence: “This is the failure of our family.”

Minutes later one of our interns messaged me privately, nervous and apologetic. He said Chloe had been bragging in the break room that her “pathetic sister” once attempted a similar idea but never knew how to finish it, so Chloe had “cleaned it up into something real.” Then he admitted he had seen her accessing the shared drive, downloading the file, scrubbing metadata, renaming the deck, and deleting traces of the original.

Not enough to erase everything. Enough to try.

Daniel entered my office five minutes later holding his tablet like it contained something toxic.

“Elena,” he said carefully, “did you authorize any of this?”

I shook my head.

He exhaled through his nose. “I didn’t think so. Something about her presentation felt wrong. Too much structural intelligence in the wrong places.”

Then, softer: “You deserve credit.”

I almost laughed at the absurdity of how much those four words still mattered.