Nicole got federal time. Not theatrical. Not spectacular. But enough. Enough to permanently mark the record. Enough to remind her that cybercrime committed in rage is still cybercrime. Enough to place distance between her and her son while supervised systems were built around safety rather than entitlement. She cried loudly at sentencing. No one moved.
Ryan drowned first on the civil side. Judgments piled up. His former employer won. I won. The debt he intended to bury under marriage became a monument to his failure. His criminal exposure was narrower than Nicole’s because the evidence lines broke differently, but in practical terms it made no difference. He was now unemployable in the worlds that had once sustained his costume. By autumn he was renting a room in a crumbling building outside Aurora, selling watches online to cover legal bills he could no longer pay.