She had seen it only in an internal draft stored on our office server.
I asked whether anyone outside the firm had received that draft.
She said she had sent it to me for review on a night when I was working from home.
The date fell within the period the camera had apparently been active.
I remembered taking the call on my living-room couch with the draft spread across the coffee table.
Simone cautioned that the overlap could have another explanation, including an unauthorized transfer from our office systems.
She arranged for a digital-forensics specialist to review access logs without changing the original files.
The specialist found an unfamiliar account that had downloaded several project folders during overnight hours.
The account had been created with credentials assigned to Owen Price.
Owen had admitted helping Patricia with the inspection, but he had never been authorized to access our design archive.
When Simone confronted him through his attorney, Owen said Elise had asked him to troubleshoot a shared project folder.
He claimed he did not know the files belonged to my firm.
His attorney offered to arrange a voluntary interview with investigators.
I wanted to call Owen a liar, but I remembered how frightened he looked when he first admitted wearing my company jacket.
He was responsible for his choices, yet he might also be the person who could explain how a neighborhood inspection became corporate theft.
That evening, Priya told me she had turned down another job offer.
She said she wanted to see the library dispute resolved before deciding whether to leave.
I told her she owed me no loyalty at the expense of her future.
She answered that she was not staying for me alone.
She was staying because somebody needed to prove that careful work still mattered.
Chapter 18: The Letter From Denver
My former wife, Rachel, called after hearing about the lawsuit from a mutual friend.
We had not spoken at length since the divorce, and I expected an awkward conversation about whether she still possessed a house key.
Instead, she asked whether Patricia had mentioned the Ridgeway project.
I nearly dropped the phone.
Rachel said Patricia had contacted her months before our separation became final.
She claimed she was gathering information for a neighborhood history project and wanted photographs of my father’s clock.
Rachel thought the request was strange and refused.
Patricia then asked whether my father had left any engineering records in our house.
Rachel told her that she did not know.
At the time, Rachel assumed Patricia was trying to collect gossip about me.
She had never mentioned the conversation because our marriage was collapsing under arguments about work, money, and the hours I spent away from home.
