Chapter 10 - The Digital Ghost
We drove back to the city in silence, the police escort trailing behind us. Once we were safely back inside our suite at the Carlyle, Savannah opened her laptop on the glass coffee table.
“Your mother lied about the text message regarding the baby’s paternity,” Savannah said, her fingers flying across the keyboard. “That was a crude psychological weapon designed to make you doubt me. But the email she tried to make you read—that’s something entirely different.”
She spun the laptop toward me. On the screen was a detailed corporate ledger, complete with digital signatures, routing numbers, and scanned PDF agreements dating back twenty-five years.
“What am I looking at?” I asked, leaning in.
“Your father didn't just discover your mother was embezzling from his firm,” Savannah explained quietly. “He discovered that the entire family fortune—every single real estate holding, every trust fund, and even the company your grandfather built—didn't belong to your family legally. Bernice stole it from someone else before you were even born.”
My breath hitched. “From who?”
May you like
Before Savannah could answer, her laptop screen flickered. The PDF document vanished, replaced automatically by a full-screen video file that had been set on a timer. The file name read: If_Found_Open_At_Midnight.
The video loaded. A face appeared on the screen—not my mother’s, and not my father’s. It was an elderly woman sitting in a stark, sterile room, looking directly into the camera lens with haunted eyes.
