Chapter 6 - The Affidavit
The glass doors of the Whitmore Building clicked shut behind Ryan and me as we crossed the threshold into the crisp Chicago morning. Behind us, Barbara’s voice was lost to the hum of traffic on Michigan Avenue. Daniel had not followed us out. He had stayed back in the sterile, marble-lined lobby, trapped between the wreckage of his marriage and the mother who had engineered it.
My phone vibrated in my palm. It was an email notification from Marcus’s office, containing a secure PDF of the formal affidavit we had just transmitted to the state's attorney’s investigator.
"He actually did it," Ryan said, exhaling a breath that plumed in the cold air. He unlocked his SUV parked at the curb and pulled the door open for me. "Daniel gave you the ammunition on a silver platter. I still can't believe he folded that fast."
"Daniel didn't fold out of courage," I said, sliding into the passenger seat and buckling up as Ryan hurried around to the driver's side. "He folded because he realized his mother was going to throw him under the bus first. Self-preservation is his default setting."
"So what's our next play? The injunction?" Ryan asked, pulling out into the light morning traffic.
"The injunction stops the city contract transfer," I replied, watching the sleek corporate towers slide past the window. "Without our properties tied to their bid, Whitmore Holdings misses the municipal filing deadline tomorrow afternoon. Barbara knows it. That's why she tried to bluff me in the lobby."
"She was sweating, Liv. Even under all that powder, she knew the audio recording was a smoking gun." Ryan glanced over at me at a red light. "Does she know we have more than just that one clip?"
I pulled a second phone from my bag—an older burner device my father had kept in his desk drawer for confidential real estate acquisitions years ago. "She doesn't know about the secondary cloud sync linked to Grant Property Group's legacy server. Every digital document Daniel accessed using my master admin key on Saturday morning wasn't just a transfer—it left a complete audit trail of deleted files and alternate routing numbers."
My phone chimed again. This time it wasn't Marcus.
It was an unknown local number, followed immediately by a text message.
Olivia. Please. Meet me at the Drake hotel coffee shop in twenty minutes. Just you. It's about my father's old ledgers.
I stared at the screen. The number didn't belong to Daniel, and it certainly didn't belong to Barbara.
May you like
It belonged to Sarah Whitmore—Daniel’s younger sister, who had supposedly been traveling in Europe for the past six months and hadn't even attended our wedding.
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