Compliance Review

Ethan did not sleep. He spent the night pacing twelve feet from refrigerator to window and back again, the laptop glowing on the table like evidence. The new digest contained six market items and one sentence that turned his stomach into ice. Account ending 1183 flagged after unusual trading pattern. Compliance review begins 09:52. Thirty-seven dollars. That was the unusual pattern. Not a million-dollar options sweep. Not an offshore account front-running a merger. Thirty-seven dollars made by an unemployed man who had bought fractional NVIDIA before a rumor hit Twitter. It was absurd, which did not make it harmless. Ethan had worked in market data long enough to know surveillance systems did not understand dignity.