Chapter 6 - THE WOMAN AT MY OFFICE DOOR
Leah moved fast.
By morning, subpoenas were being prepared for records preservation, not accusations.
“Preserve first,” she told me. “Fight later.”
That phrase became my rule.
My company’s legal department could no longer be trusted, so Evan obtained archived banking records through my personal authorization.
The three-hundred-thousand-dollar payment had gone from my investment account to MBE Consulting.
Two days later, two hundred and sixty-five thousand had moved from MBE to an account owned by Holloway Strategic Advisors.
Grant’s brother.
Thirty-five thousand had gone elsewhere.
A private security company.
“Why security?” I asked.
Evan enlarged the invoice.
Executive access containment.
The date made my skin crawl.
It was the week Mara had said she came to my office.
Leah hired a records researcher.
By evening, an old building-access archive surfaced from the property management company that had operated our headquarters then.
Visitors were photographed at the lobby desk.
March nineteenth.
Mara Bennett.
Pregnant, though barely visibly.
March twenty-second.
Mara Bennett again.
The second photograph caught her turned slightly toward the camera.
The scar above her eyebrow looked fresh.
I stared at it.
That scar had been faint last night.
Seven years earlier, it had been red.
“What happened to your eyebrow?” I asked her that evening.
She went quiet.
“Why?”
“I found the visitor photos.”
Mara looked away.
“The second time I came, security wouldn’t let me past the lobby.”
“They hurt you?”
“Not intentionally.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“One guard tried to push the revolving door closed while I was still inside because Grant had told them I was a threat.”
My jaw tightened.
“I fell.”
“While pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“And you never reported it?”
“To whom? Your lawyer?”
I had no response.
She touched the scar unconsciously.
“I went to urgent care. The babies were fine.”
I looked at the old access record.
Beside her name was an internal instruction.
DO NOT ADMIT. CONTACT G.H. IMMEDIATELY.
G.H.
Grant Holloway.
Another question answered.
Mara had not simply disappeared.
She had physically come looking for me.
Twice.
And my own people had stopped her.
The second visit contained something else.
A notation showing Grant personally came downstairs eight minutes after security called him.
Mara had said Grant told her I wanted no contact.
Now the building record placed him there.
“Did he see you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“That you were upstairs.”
I felt sick.
“Was I?”
“I don’t know.”
I did.
I checked my calendar archive.
March twenty-second, 2:00 p.m.
Board strategy session.
Thirty-second floor.
I had been less than three hundred feet above her.
“What did Grant tell you?”
Mara’s voice went flat.
“He said you had watched me on the lobby camera and told him to make sure I never came upstairs.”
I closed my eyes.
Seven years ago, I had sat in a conference room reviewing market projections while the woman carrying my possible children bled from a cut downstairs.
Then Evan called.
He had found the missing thirty-five-thousand-dollar security payment.
The invoice signer was not Grant.
It was Eleanor Whitaker.
And written beside the service description were five words:
May you like
Keep Bennett away from Adrian.
📖 The lobby archive proved Mara had reached Adrian’s building twice, while Eleanor’s own authorization showed exactly who ordered the doors closed against her. 👇
