Chapter 4 - The Locked Office
By eight that morning, Vanessa was no longer my fiancée.
I didn’t make a speech. I didn’t throw the ring at her. I simply told her the wedding was off and asked her to stay in the guest wing until I could arrange for her things to be removed.
She laughed once.
“You’re ending five years over a frightened child’s story?”
“I’m ending it because you sent an accusation before the event happened.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Maybe. But it’s mine to make.”
Her face changed then. Not anger exactly. Calculation.
“You can’t just throw me out.”
“The house is mine.”
“We were building a life.”
“My children are my life.”
That shut the room down.
I called our security director, Marcus Reed—not related, just an unfortunate coincidence—and told him to meet me in the control room.
He looked uncomfortable before I even mentioned the missing footage.
“That camera shouldn’t have a gap,” he said.
“Can footage be deleted?”
“Not from the phone app. Only from the admin console.”
“Who has access?”
He hesitated.
“Me. You. And…”
“And?”
“Vanessa asked for temporary access two months ago. She said she was coordinating contractors.”
I felt my jaw tighten. “Did you give it to her?”
“She had your authorization code.”
I had never given her that code.
Marcus pulled the system logs.
At 4:17 p.m. the previous day, an administrator had deleted eleven minutes from Stair Camera 2.
The login came from my home office.
My locked home office.
I checked the biometric entry log.
The door had been opened at 4:16.
With my fingerprint.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
Marcus looked at me. “Were you home?”
“I was downtown.”
Emma, standing beside me because she refused to be alone, tugged my sleeve.
“Daddy?”
I crouched.
She whispered, “Vanessa has your finger.”
I blinked. “What?”
“My science kit.”
Then I remembered the silicone fingerprint experiment Emma and I had done three weeks earlier.
We made molds for fun.
Mine had disappeared.
Marcus looked at the entry log again.
May you like
Then he said, “Daniel, there’s something else.”
At 4:18, the same person who deleted the staircase footage opened the safe in your office.
