The American non-compete is not dead, but it is smaller, more expensive, and far more jurisdictionally contingent than the boilerplate in most employment agreements assumes. This article traces what actually happened between 2021 and 2026: a wave of state statutes imposing income thresholds, advance-notice requirements, and garden-leave payment obligations; a federal rule that would have banned nearly all non-competes, was set aside by a district court, and was abandoned on appeal; and a quiet migration of employer leverage from covenant enforcement to trade secret litigation. It explains the reasonableness framework and its four dials, why the difference between blue-pencil, reformation, and red-pencil states changes how a covenant should be drafted rather than merely how it is litigated, and why choice-of-law and forum clauses now trigger anti-enforcement statutes in several states rather than resolving the question. It covers customer and employee non-solicitation, the antitrust exposure that attaches when two employers agree rather than when one employer contracts with its own worker, the Defend Trade Secrets Act's rejection of inevitable disclosure and its rarely satisfied whistleblower-immunity notice requirement, and the collapse of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim after Van Buren. It closes with the practical architecture of a departure case: preservation, forensics, expedited discovery, and the discipline of hiring from a competitor without inheriting the competitor's litigation.