Simone asked why he had never warned me afterward.
Owen looked down at his hands.
He said Elise had sent him a recording of his own voice discussing confidential client information.
She threatened to destroy his career if he told anyone.
I wanted to shout at him.
Instead, I asked whether he had given Elise my alarm code.
He nodded.
I asked whether he had seen her carry anything into the house.
He said she had brought a canvas bag and asked him to wait in the kitchen.
He had heard a drill but assumed she was fixing a wall bracket.
I stared at him until he looked away.
Then I asked why he had worn my company jacket that day.
He said Elise told him it would make the visit look like routine maintenance.
Simone ended the conversation and told Owen to seek independent legal advice before making any formal statement.
When he left, I sat in silence for several minutes.
I had expected betrayal to feel like anger.
Instead, it felt like discovering that the floor beneath my feet had been hollow for months.
Chapter 12: The Missing Minute
The next development came from the camera files.
Officer Ruiz told Simone that several recordings appeared to have been deleted from the memory card.
A specialist had recovered fragments, but the timestamps were incomplete.
One recovered clip showed Patricia sitting alone in my living room.
She held a phone to her ear and appeared to be arguing with someone.
The audio was damaged, but one sentence was clear.
She said she would not take the blame for what Grant had ordered.
Grant was the first name of Northstar’s managing partner.
Simone warned me that the sentence alone did not establish which Grant Patricia meant.
Still, she asked the investigators to preserve the clip and compare it with other evidence.
That evening, I drove past the public library that my firm had hoped to renovate.
A temporary construction fence surrounded the building.
Northstar’s logo covered a large sign beside the entrance.
I parked across the street and watched workers carry equipment through the front doors.
The building had served the neighborhood for nearly a century.
My father had taken me there every Saturday when I was a child.
He used to let me choose one book about buildings and one book about anything else.
The renovation had mattered to me for reasons that never appeared in the bid documents.
I had wanted to preserve a place where I first learned that someone could design something lasting.
Now I wondered whether people I knew had stolen more than a contract.
