My ex used a restraining order to take my startup and life—now she’s suing me for everything. AITA?

I’m 27 and four months ago I cheated on no one—what I did was trust my then-business partner and girlfriend with our incorporation documents. After she left, she filed a protection order claiming “harassment” and the court froze the company bank accounts and my personal accounts tied to it. Overnight my payroll bounced, contractors stopped, and she filed a civil suit claiming she founded the product and that I forged her signature. I have emails, commit histories, and investors’ texts that say otherwise, but the restraining order blocked me from accessing the shared drive for three weeks. By the time I could, some files were “missing.”

I scrimped for a cheap lawyer, begged friends for rides, and watched her post celebratory photos while our servers went dark. Last night I found an old backup with timestamps that could exonerate me—except the USB is with my brother, who swears he mailed it but won’t answer his phone. Court is tomorrow and the judge could issue a permanent injunction before I can produce proof. My lawyer said one wrong move and I could lose the company—and face fraud claims. I sat in my car outside the courthouse, packet of subpoenas in hand, and my phone buzzed with a new message that made my stomach drop…

The message was short and stupidly precise: “Tracking says delivered 9:03 AM to 12 Elm Drive.” My stomach dropped so hard it felt like the car lurched. I called my brother before I could think it through and heard nothing but his voicemail—breathing, then a click, then nothing. Three weeks of everything hollowing out around me, and now the one thing that could cut through it sat somewhere in someone else’s hands because some algorithm at USPS told him it was delivered. I sat there with the packet of subpoenas half folded in my lap and felt the day harden into something I couldn’t soften.

I wasn’t thinking straight, so I drove over. His building smelled of old cigarettes and fried food, and he opened the door with that guilty look he always gets when he knows he’s about to get yelled at. “Where’s the USB?” I asked before he could say hello. He flinched like I’d hit him. “I…I gave it to her,” he said. His voice was small in a way I hadn’t heard since we were kids and he’d stolen my bike and then cried about it. “She came by. She said she’d stop this if I handed it over. She swore she’d just look and then return it.”

“No,” I said. The word came out flat and useless. “You handed the only copy to the person accusing me of forging her signature?” He nodded, hands trembling at the strap of his backpack. “I thought—man, I thought if she had it she’d back off. I didn’t know she’d use it to freeze everything.” His apology was a mouthful of ragged breath; it wasn’t the kind of thing that fixed things. It was the kind that made me feel twice the weight: because someone I loved had failed me, and because I’d trusted the kind of people who could fail me.

He opened a drawer with shaking hands and pulled out a smaller drive—one with scuffs and a label that said “old commits.” It wasn’t the backup I needed, but it had fragments: logs, email headers, commit timestamps that matched some of what I had printed out in my attachments packet. “It’s not perfect,” he said. “But it’s something.” I held it and saw the reflection of my own face bent over a small rectangle of plastic, stupid and grateful and furious. I called my lawyer, voice steady when I needed it, and explained we had partial metadata, a witness who could testify to the chain of custody, and an emergency motion ready to file if the judge would entertain it.

On the drive to the courthouse my hands didn’t stop shaking. I thought about the contractors who were going without pay, about the coder who texted me last night asking what was happening, about the investors who’d trusted a kid with a dream and now watched it wobble. “You understand what’s at stake?” I asked my brother. He swallowed. “I do. I am so sorry. I’ll tell the whole truth in court. I’ll say I handed it to her if that’ll help.” There was bravery in his apology, cheap and small and also the only honest thing in the room, and it made me realize betrayal wasn’t binary; it was a messy spectrum where fear and love had collided and left wreckage.

We went in together. The hallway smelled of lemon disinfectant and old paper; people moved past us like we were a movie they didn’t want to watch. My lawyer squeezed my shoulder as we approached the metal detectors and whispered, “We can ask for an emergency in-camera review of the files and a temporary lift on the freeze to get payroll moving, but I need a judge willing to listen to the partial chain of custody and a witness willing to swear under oath.” I thought of the USB in the hands of someone who had a history of playing people like chess pieces. I thought of everything I’d already lost and everything that could still be saved if I played this right. My throat closed and then opened. “Do it,” I said. “Do it now.”