Chapter 4 - The Dead Woman’s Account
I didn’t sleep.
At 4:17 a.m., I sat in my study staring at Emily’s photograph.
She was laughing in it.
Sophie was two.
I remembered taking the picture.
I remembered Emily dying eleven months later.
I remembered the hospital.
The funeral.
The grave.
Dead women did not authorize corporate transfers.
So either someone was using her credentials—
or everything I believed about the money was wrong.
By sunrise, Rebecca had answers.
Emily’s executive credentials had been accessed eleven times after her death.
All eleven accesses originated from corporate headquarters.
Richard’s floor.
But the deeper Rebecca searched, the stranger it became.
The account wasn’t stealing money.
It was tracking it.
Emily had created a hidden compliance archive six months before her death.
Richard apparently discovered it later and used fragments of its coding structure to disguise his own transactions.
Which meant Emily had been investigating something before she died.
Something she never told me.
At nine, Sophie came downstairs.
“You look terrible.”
I stared at her.
She shrugged.
“Mom used to say that when you worked all night.”
For the first time in hours, I smiled.
“Your mother was very honest.”
“She said you needed people to be honest with you.”
The smile disappeared.
Children have a way of accidentally opening locked doors.
That afternoon, Thomas arrived carrying a box.
Emily’s handwriting was on the lid.
I couldn’t touch it.
“Where did you get this?”
“She gave it to me.”
“When?”
“Two weeks before the accident.”
My heart stopped.
“You had this for three years?”
“She made me promise not to give it to you unless something happened inside Bellmont that made me believe her concerns were justified.”
Anger rose.
“You decided that for me?”
“No.”
Thomas met my eyes.
“Emily did.”
Inside the box were financial reports.
Employee statements.
Photographs.
And a sealed envelope.
Daniel.
My hands shook opening it.
The letter was short.
Emily had suspected Richard was manipulating vendor contracts.
But she had no proof.
She also feared telling me too early because Richard had become deeply embedded in company operations.
The last paragraph broke me.
If I’m wrong, burn this and forgive me for doubting your friend. If I’m right, don’t let betrayal make you hard. Sophie needs her father more than Bellmont needs its owner.
I sat there a long time.
Then Rebecca called.
Richard had disappeared.
His apartment was empty.
His company laptop was gone.
And someone had attempted to wipe Bellmont’s central servers.
But Richard had overlooked one thing.
Emily’s archive.
It contained backups.
Names.
Dates.
Contracts.
Enough evidence to reconstruct years of fraud.
But there was something else.
A scheduled file.
Created by Emily.
Never opened.
The title was:
FOR DANIEL — IF RICHARD EVER RUNS.
I stared at the screen.
Rebecca whispered, “Should I open it?”
I thought about the woman I had buried.
Then the friend who had betrayed me.
“Open it.”
The video began.
Emily appeared on screen.
Alive.
Smiling sadly.
May you like
And the first words out of my dead wife’s mouth were:
“Daniel, if you’re watching this, Richard finally made the mistake I knew he would.”
