In five years, the Meridian system had found and helped with forty-seven cases.Not every one of them had ended well. Three were still open, still unfinished. But that was the nature of this kind of work; it was never really about finishing. It was about staying. About choosing, again and again, to keep showing up instead of walking away.On the first day of every month, Zeph sat down and looked through the open cases himself. He wrote a short summary each time, simple, careful, with no extra words. And somehow, in that quiet simplicity, it said everything that truly needed to be said.The company was no longer mid-size. Lena had resisted the word large for eighteen months before Hartwell, in his measured way, had simply included it in a quarterly report, and she had read it and not corrected it. Large it was. The Hargrove contract was three times what it had been. The partnership with the conglomerate had produced two subsidiary arrangements that had, in turn, produced a platform tha