Chapter 15
By Wednesday, Rowe & Vale had suspended its procurement director and terminated all consulting arrangements with Caldwell Strategic Services.
Crescent Harbor opened an internal review.
Evan preserved the server evidence.
My company changed every credential, token, device certificate, and administrative access method.
Nathan was served with divorce papers Thursday morning.
I didn’t see him receive them.
I was working.
But Thursday afternoon, he sent a message.
“You didn’t have to do it like this.”
I stared at the screen for a few seconds.
Then deleted it without replying.
Brynn was harder.
She disappeared for almost a week.
Her social accounts went silent.
Calls stopped.
No messages.
No surprise visits.
That silence should have relieved me.
Instead, it made me nervous.
People like Brynn did not suddenly become quiet when they had spent years believing they deserved the last word.
On the following Tuesday, Evan called me into the conference room.
“We found another device.”
I stopped walking.
“What?”
“The forty-three accesses weren’t all from the same source.”
I sat down.
He showed me the breakdown.
Thirty-one accesses came from the laptop associated with Brynn.
Nine came from my home.
We already knew that.
But the remaining three had always seemed different because they used a Charlotte hotel network.
Evan had traced the device fingerprint more deeply.
It wasn’t Brynn’s laptop.
It wasn’t Nathan’s.
“Whose?”
“We don’t know.”
Those three sessions were also the strangest.
They didn’t access proposals.
They accessed employee records.
Salary information.
Resumes.
Performance reviews.
Personal contact details.
I stared at the list.
“What would Brynn want with my employees?”
Evan looked uncomfortable.
“Recruitment.”
Northline Collaborative.
A competitor built from the inside.
Not only my clients.
My people.
The three accesses occurred four months earlier.
Two weeks after Northline was registered.
I asked Mia to send me a list of anyone who had resigned during that period.
There were two.
A junior project manager who moved to Atlanta.
And a senior designer named Caleb Morris.
Caleb had told me he was taking time away to help his father recover from surgery.
I had sent flowers.
His LinkedIn page still showed no new position.
Dana hired an investigator.
Forty-eight hours later, we learned Caleb had not moved away permanently.
He had an apartment in Raleigh.
More importantly, he had received $28,000 from Northline Collaborative.
I sat in Dana’s office staring at the report.
“So there were three of them.”
“Maybe.”
“Brynn, Nathan, Caleb.”
“Maybe more.”
The words made me nauseous.
How many people around me had known?
How many conversations had been real?
How many lunches had been auditions for the business replacing mine?
That afternoon, I reviewed security footage from the office.
Our system retained only ninety days of video.
Too late for most of the suspicious activity.
But one clip mattered.
It was from a Saturday six weeks earlier.
The office was closed.
At 3:14 p.m., Nathan entered using my guest badge.
I had forgotten he still had it.
At 3:19, Brynn entered behind him.
They stayed fifty-three minutes.
Neither had told me they were there.
At 3:42, they walked past the hallway camera carrying a small black case.
I recognized it.
My portable backup drive.
The drive had disappeared the following Monday.
I believed I had lost it during a trip.
I had ordered a new one and cursed myself for being careless.
Brynn was carrying it.
I watched the clip five times.
Each viewing hurt less and taught me more.
On the sixth, I noticed Nathan wasn’t carrying anything.
He was following her.
May you like
Brynn walked ahead.
Nathan looked nervous.
