I quietly ignored the glaring red flags.

The morning of his highly anticipated national submission finally arrived. I was officially standing in the fully decorated, bright hallway. The strong, overwhelming smell of expensive catering and incredibly loud corporate ambition made my stomach violently churn with a strange, dark premonition. I tightly clutched my empty coffee mug.

Then, right when I proudly walked to my desk, the massive black hard drive was completely, suffocatingly wiped. It was just an empty disk.

“I’ll be presenting a huge gallery today, Maya!” Sterling yelled loudly, tossing me a cheap sweeping broom from the hallway. “My submission is going to change the industry!”

My legs completely died under me. Something behind my ribs aggressively folded in on itself as my vibrant art vanished.

I spent exactly four freezing, brutal weeks aggressively watching him accept massive corporate awards, completely trusting his firm’s massive ignorance. Sterling sat in the lobby, casually sipping his expensive craft water and loudly bragging to his colleagues about the brilliance of my exact photographs.

Not when he flaunted his massive finalist status.
Not when the art blogs paid him massive compliments.
Not when I sobbed incredibly heavy internal tears wondering how to expose him.
Not when he explicitly told me he was firing me after he won.

I sat completely still. I looked at the massive prize check sitting perfectly on his pristine presentation table. The art I had earned through blood, sweat, and absolute tears was a complete lie.

I didn’t yell. I didn’t throw my heavy coffee mug. My jaw locked so incredibly tight I could clearly taste thick, metallic blood in my mouth.

I simply pulled out my incredibly thick federal copyright folder.

Because Sterling completely forgot one vital, highly fatal detail in his absolute, unchecked arrogance.

I didn’t actually just capture normal civilian photos. Because I suspected his massive greed years ago, I officially encoded every single raw file with a massive, invisible steganographic digital watermark linked directly to my federal copyright registration. It was a highly tracked, completely restricted sole intellectual property, and Sterling had illegally submitted it to a massive national committee. And exactly one week prior, I had explicitly alerted the committee chairman, my own father, about the massive fraud.

I’ve never dialed my own corporate attorney so incredibly fast in my entire life.

Standing right in the middle of his presentation in our lobby, I officially dropped my thick, federally stamped corporate copyright logs and the massive lawsuit directly onto the expensive glass table.