Last Resort

He pitched the idea over dinner. His wife handed him divorce papers before dessert. Thirty days later: no job, no home, no notebook with any of it written down. Just a cracked laptop and a habit he won't name yet. He builds it anyway — a system that reads the documents nobody has time to read. His first client pays up front and gives him forty-eight hours. It works. And that's the problem. Because the more small companies he saves, the more he sees they were all destroyed exactly the same way. At the same intervals. In the same order. Small businesses don't collapse on schedule. One man. No employees. And a question he's been putting off since that first night: who knew about his idea before he built it?