Chapter 6 - The Grand Vista Feed
The glow of my laptop screen felt blinding in the dark study as my finger hovered over the trackpad.
Fifty thousand dollars gone. Siphoned out of our joint savings account at 8:45 PM—precisely when Justin had walked out the front door muttering about checking his mother into a hotel. And now, this chilling text message pointing me straight to the Grand Vista Hotel lobby cameras.
Without thinking, I grabbed my phone, opened my web browser, and typed in the URL for the guest-access portal of the Grand Vista security feed—a public-facing concierge tool I had once used when booking a conference room there last year.
The login page loaded with a sluggish spin of the wheel. I punched in my old credentials, praying they hadn't revoked my guest profile yet.
Access granted.
A grid of live camera feeds popped up on my screen: the parking garage, the mezzanine, and finally, CAMERA 04: MAIN LOBBY.
I maximized the lobby feed and scrubbed backward to the timestamp: 8:50 PM.
There he was. Justin.
He wasn't standing at the front desk checking in his mother or dealing with luggage. He was sitting in a plush leather armchair in the far corner of the lobby, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Standing directly in front of him wasn't Virginia or Walter.
It was a sleek, impeccably dressed woman with sharp blonde hair and a designer blazer I recognized instantly.
Elena Vance. Justin’s ex-fiancée from five years ago—the woman who had supposedly skipped town with half her company’s accounts before we met, leaving Justin emotionally scarred and supposedly bankrupt.
My breath hitched in my throat as I watched the timestamp advance. On screen, Elena reached into a leather folio, pulled out a stack of documents, and handed them across the coffee table to my husband. Justin took them without hesitation, his expression intensely focused, wearing a look of quiet, conspiratorial complicity that I had never once seen him direct toward me in all our years of marriage.
My phone buzzed again in my palm. Another text from that same unknown number:
“He never broke things off with her, Chloe. He just needed a quiet place to hide the money while they liquidated your assets.”
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Before I could process the sheer scale of the deception, the front door of our apartment clicked open, and heavy footsteps echoed softly in the entryway.
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