Leah didn’t touch her dessert. “Because if you’re in a senior operations role there, you might want to be more careful about discussing your title publicly.”
Trevor frowned. “What does that mean?”
Raymond gave a short, dismissive laugh. “She wants attention.”
Denise shot Leah a look that contained years of instruction. Leah saw it clearly. She simply declined to follow it.
“I’m not trying to ruin dinner,” Leah said. “I’m trying to understand why someone in regional operations is announcing his role so casually at a company currently dealing with a serious compliance investigation.”
The room went quiet.
Not gradually. Immediately, the way rooms go quiet when something has been said that cannot be unsaid.
Raymond stared at her, fork suspended. Then his expression moved through several things in rapid succession: dismissal, reconsideration, and finally a rigid blankness she recognized as a man deciding how to manage a situation he hadn’t anticipated.
“That’s nonsense,” he said.
Leah’s voice stayed even. “Is it?”
Trevor set down his fork and looked at his father. “Dad, what is she talking about?”
“Nothing,” Raymond said. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Leah looked briefly at her phone — not to reveal anything confidential, but to confirm a single detail she already knew from public state filings, regulatory records, a vendor audit document that had been indexed on a third-party server before anyone caught the error. Enough to know she wasn’t mistaken.
She looked back at Raymond.
“NorthRiver had a documented exposure event involving patient-related billing records,” she said. “Not full medical charts, but sufficient personally identifiable information to trigger mandatory reporting obligations. The exposure appears tied to inadequate internal access controls and vendor-side configuration failures. If you’re in regional operations, you either knew about it and chose to spend dinner mocking me anyway, or you didn’t know, which is considerably worse.”
Kayla lowered her wine glass slowly.
Trevor’s expression moved from unease to something closer to alarm. “Dad?”
Raymond forced a laugh. It sounded thin. “Sweetheart, companies have audits all the time. That’s just business.”
“An audit and an exposure event are not the same thing,” Leah said.
Denise found her voice: “Leah, that’s enough.”