"And did you?"
"Sometimes."
"Were the people you reported usually known to you?"
"No."
"Did you ever personally witness theft?"
Evelyn looked down.
"I thought I did."
"That was not my question."
The transcript would later become one of the most damaging documents in the case.
Not because Evelyn confessed to hatred.
She did not.
Because she described something more ordinary and therefore more disturbing.
She had been trained by repetition to believe her assumptions were useful.
The store had rewarded those assumptions often enough that certainty became habit.
Talia read the deposition alone in her office after midnight.
She had expected anger.
What she felt instead was responsibility.
Evelyn had caused harm.
Paige had caused harm.
Grant had caused harm.
NorthStar had designed incentives that made harm profitable.
But the company had provided the room, the payroll, the database, and the silence.
Talia could not fix that by winning a public argument against one woman.
She had to decide whether she wanted to protect the brand or change it.
Those were no longer the same thing.
Discovery changed the case from a public-relations crisis into something more dangerous.
For years, Marrow & Finch had stored security footage for thirty days and incident reports for five years.
That was the official policy.
NorthStar had quietly kept more.
When Talia's lawyers demanded preservation of all materials tied to the observation database, the security company disclosed an archived server containing selected clips from more than two hundred customer interventions.
The files were not labeled with names.
They were labeled with numbers and shorthand.
R-14.
R-22.
VIP concern.
Bag hesitation.
Fitting-room mismatch.
High-value floor.
The clips were training material.
NorthStar had used real Marrow & Finch customers to teach guards how to identify what it called pre-loss indicators.
Talia watched three clips before she had to stop.
In one, a Black woman in a winter coat browsed handbags while a guard followed at a distance of six feet for eleven minutes.
She bought a wallet.
The training caption beneath the clip read: Extended handling before purchase, possible concealment preparation.
In another, a Latino father waited outside a fitting room while his teenage daughter tried on a dress. A guard approached him twice because he had not purchased anything himself.
In a third, an Asian graduate student was stopped near the exit because she had placed her phone inside her tote while walking.
She had receipts for everything she bought.
The training note praised the guard for assertive engagement.
Talia closed the laptop.
"How many people were told they were part of training material?"
Nadia answered quietly.
"None that we can identify."
The company's attorney, David Chen, looked physically ill.
"This creates privacy issues beyond the discrimination claims."
"Then add them to the list," Talia said.
NorthStar's lawyer tried a different approach.
He argued that the security company had simply implemented Marrow & Finch's expectations.
To support that claim, he produced emails from Grant Mercer.
The emails were worse than Talia expected.
Grant had repeatedly complained that Hawthorne employees were too hesitant to intervene with customers who did not fit the boutique's established profile.
In one message, he wrote that associates needed to protect the comfort level of core clientele.
In another, he praised Paige for reducing what he called visual disorder on premium floors.
Nobody had defined visual disorder.
The examples did.
Large backpacks.
Groups of teenagers.
Customers taking photographs of price tags.
People wearing work uniforms.
Customers who spent long periods browsing without buying.
The language never named race.
It did not need to.
The outcomes had recorded what the language concealed.
The state consumer protection division opened a formal inquiry.
So did the city human rights commission.
A reporter asked Talia whether she feared losing the company.
She answered honestly.
"Yes."
The reporter seemed surprised.
"But you are cooperating with the investigations."
"Cooperation does not erase liability."
"Do you regret buying Marrow & Finch?"
Talia looked through the conference-room window at the sales floor.
"Ask me after we decide what kind of company it is going to become."
The next week brought the hardest testimony yet.
A former NorthStar guard named Devon Marks asked to speak with investigators.
He had worked the Hawthorne store for nineteen months.
Devon arrived with printed schedules, text messages, and handwritten notes he had kept because, as he put it, "I knew eventually somebody would ask who told us to do this."
He described informal contests between guards.
Most stops in a week.
Most recoveries.
Most successful engagements.
A recovery meant stolen merchandise was actually found.
An engagement could mean almost anything.
Following someone.
Requesting a receipt.
Asking a customer to leave a fitting room.
Calling a manager.
Standing near the exit until the customer became uncomfortable enough to leave.
"Were you paid more for engagements?" the plaintiffs' lawyer asked during his deposition.
"Not directly. The company got bonuses. We got better shifts if supervisors liked our numbers."
"What numbers?"
"Contacts."
"Was there a race quota?"
"No."
"Were you told to target Black customers?"
"Not in those words."
"What words were used?"
Devon looked down at his hands.
"They'd say, you know the type. Or, doesn't match the floor. Or, watch the expensive racks when the crowd changes."
The attorney waited.
"What did you understand those phrases to mean?"
Devon exhaled slowly.
"I understood who they meant."
That sentence appeared in the newspaper the next morning.
Talia read it at six-thirty while drinking coffee she could not taste.
Her board called an emergency meeting.
Two investors wanted her to stop cooperating beyond what subpoenas required.
One suggested attacking Devon's credibility.
"He was fired from NorthStar," the investor said. "That matters."
"He quit," Talia replied.
"Same difference in public perception."
"No, it isn't."
The investor leaned forward.
"Your job is to protect shareholder value."
Talia looked around the table.
"If protecting shareholder value requires us to pretend our own files do not exist, then we have a larger governance problem than I thought."
The room became quiet.
Talia proposed commissioning an independent report with authority to publish findings even if they embarrassed the company.
Three directors opposed it.
The vote passed anyway.
That decision cost Talia politically inside the business.
It also changed the lawsuit.
For the first time, the plaintiffs' lawyers believed the company might actually disclose facts they had expected to spend years fighting to obtain.
Settlement conversations began in earnest.
But before numbers could be discussed, the plaintiffs demanded something Talia had not anticipated.
A public listening session.
No cameras controlled by the company.
No scripted moderator.
No promises of praise for reform.
Just customers, former employees, managers, and owners in one room.
Talia agreed.
The session lasted four hours.
A woman described crying in her car after a guard emptied her purse on a counter.
A father said his son had stopped shopping downtown after being followed through three departments.
A former associate admitted she had learned to warn Black customers quietly when a certain manager was working.
"Why didn't you report it?" Talia asked.
The employee looked directly at her.
"To who?"
Talia had no answer.
That question followed her home.
To who?
A complaint system mattered only if the person receiving the complaint was not part of the problem.