Chapter 2
Competitors make smart guesses.
Clients talk.
But sitting in that kitchen after seeing Brynn wrapped in my husband’s arms, coincidence suddenly felt like a luxury I could no longer afford.
I owned a commercial design firm called Whitmore Studio.
We handled retail launches, restaurants, boutique hotels, and hospitality projects throughout North Carolina and Virginia.
I had started the firm nine years earlier with one leased office, two employees, a secondhand conference table, and a credit card I was terrified to look at.
Now thirty-two people depended on the company for their salaries.
We had offices in Raleigh and Richmond.
Our client list had taken nearly a decade to build.
Some of our proposal documents contained pricing structures, vendor agreements, expansion strategies, and pre-launch plans worth far more than they looked like on a laptop screen.
Brynn knew that.
She had been watching me build the company since the beginning.
For years, I thought she was proud of me.
That night, I opened my work laptop.
I wasn’t even sure what I was searching for at first.
I logged into our cloud administration portal and opened the security dashboard.
Our system kept an access history for sensitive folders.
Normally, I left the technical side to our managed IT provider.
That night, I started reading.
The first strange login appeared eight months earlier.
It happened at 11:38 p.m. on a Sunday.
My administrator account had accessed a folder containing preliminary pricing for a resort project outside Charlottesville.
I had been asleep at that time.
At least, I thought I had.
I kept scrolling.
There was another login eleven days later.
Then another.
Some came from my home network.
Some came from a device identifier I didn’t recognize.
Others occurred during weekends when Nathan and I had been traveling.
I began counting.
Eleven.
Nineteen.
Twenty-six.
Thirty-four.
By the time I reached the bottom of the report, I had counted forty-three accesses to folders containing client proposals, pricing notes, draft presentations, vendor lists, confidential contracts, and internal financial forecasts.
Forty-three.
I stared at the number until the screen blurred.
Suddenly, the photograph on my phone felt smaller.
My husband might have betrayed my marriage.
My best friend might have helped him do it.
But somebody had also been inside my company.
And whoever it was had been there long before Brynn decided to send me that picture.
I downloaded the access log to an encrypted drive.
Then I downloaded another copy.
My instinct was to change every password immediately, but something stopped me.
If I locked whoever was doing this out, they would know I had discovered them.
If I didn’t, they might come back.
And if they came back while I was watching, I might finally learn exactly what they wanted.
At 11:16 p.m., my phone rang.
Nathan.
I watched his name vibrate across the counter until the call ended.
He called again.
I let that one end too.
A minute later, a message arrived.
“You awake?”
I didn’t answer.
Then Brynn sent one.
“Don’t tell me you’re crying.”
I looked at those words for a long time.
There are moments when you discover the person hurting you has completely misunderstood your silence.
Brynn thought I was collapsing.
In reality, I was becoming very still.
At 11:41, I called only one person.
His name was Evan Park.
Evan owned the cybersecurity firm my company had used for the previous three years.
He answered on the fourth ring sounding half asleep.
“Laurel?”
“I need you to look at something.”
“It’s almost midnight.”
May you like
“I know.”
Something in my voice must have changed his mind about complaining.
