Chapter 11 - THE PERSON STILL FEEDING HER
Only four people had access to my old personal photographs.
Me.
Rebecca.
Camille.
And my longtime assistant, Lauren Pierce.
I didn’t want it to be Lauren.
That was precisely why I had to check.
Lauren had worked for me nine years.
She managed travel, calendars, family appointments, even some of Natalie’s medical scheduling during her pregnancy.
When I asked whether she had sent Camille anything, she looked insulted.
Then frightened.
“Grant, no.”
“Did Camille ever ask for archive access?”
Lauren hesitated.
“After you got engaged.”
My stomach dropped.
“She said she was making a memorial album for Mia.”
“What did you give her?”
“A folder link.”
“How much was in it?”
Lauren opened her laptop.
More than six thousand photographs.
Calendar exports.
Travel receipts.
Old scanned documents.
I closed my eyes.
Another door we had opened for Camille.
Lauren started crying.
“I thought she loved Mia.”
“So did I.”
We checked access logs.
Camille’s account downloaded nearly everything.
But the recent anonymous email had not come from Camille.
Metadata pointed toward Lauren’s work computer.
She turned white.
“I didn’t send it.”
IT examined the machine.
Remote-control software had been installed months earlier.
Authorized under an administrative request.
Approved by Adrian Cole as an “external security consultant.”
I stared at Lauren.
“Who let Adrian near our systems?”
She looked confused.
“Camille said you approved him.”
Again.
My name used as permission.
Not through brilliant hacking.
Through people assuming my wife spoke for me.
The IT team shut Adrian’s access down immediately.
That was the reward.
The trusted person was not betraying me.
She had been exploited.
But the discovery created consequences.
My company’s board demanded an investigation into how personal and corporate systems became mixed.
They were right.
I had allowed convenience to become security policy.
I appointed an outside firm and temporarily surrendered administrative privileges.
That decision cost me control again.
It also removed another weapon from Camille.
Then investigators reviewing the remote software found historical session logs.
Adrian had accessed my personal drive the night before the trust amendment was created.
He downloaded a scanned passport.
My digital-signature certificate.
And a video of me completing facial verification for a business loan.
Rachel looked at the files.
“He could impersonate you.”
The forged trust authorization suddenly had a technical path.
More importantly, Adrian’s access occurred while I was in Chicago.
Camille had been home with Mia.
The same night Mia recorded her telling someone:
“He won’t check.”
The financial case was becoming structure rather than accusation.
Then one final log appeared.
Adrian had opened a folder named NATALIE - ESTATE.
He spent forty-seven minutes inside it.
And downloaded one document.
May you like
Natalie’s original will.
📖 Adrian had everything needed to forge my approval, but his interest in Natalie’s will suggested Mia’s trust was only one piece of what they wanted. 👇
