Chapter 7 - The Digital Counter-Strike
The color drained from Evelyn’s face until she looked like a wax mannequin left out in the cold. "You... you hacked my computer?"
"I backed up evidence of criminal surveillance in a room where my ten-month-old daughter was sleeping," Jason corrected coldly. "And unlike you, Evelyn, I didn't just look at the last twelve hours. I looked at the metadata logs from the last six months."
He reached over her shoulder, completely ignoring her instinctive flinch, and tapped three keys on the mechanical keyboard. The dual screens flickered, pulling up a split-screen dashboard of video archives and deleted file caches.
"Look at this, Claire," Jason said.
I stepped closer, shifting Emma’s weight so her face stayed shielded from the blue glare of the monitors.
On the left screen was the footage from the dining room tonight.
Evelyn had a wide-angle 4K lens disguised as a carbon monoxide detector mounted above the china cabinet. The video was crisp, hyper-detailed, and captured in flawless high-definition audio.
It didn't show an unhinged mother abandoning her baby.
It showed Evelyn smiling with chilling cruelty as she placed the stainless-steel dog bowl in front of Emma. It captured the exact, clear audio of Evelyn’s voice: *“There. Maybe Emma can eat from something she can’t break.”*
It showed Emma whimpering, reaching out her tiny hands.
It showed Evelyn gripping the legs of the high chair and violently shoving it across the hardwood into the pitch-black corner by the pantry, sneering: *“She can eat over there. I don’t want her ruining the Christmas pictures.”*
And then it captured me—standing up with absolute maternal composure, walking over, picking up my daughter, wiping her tears, and speaking with quiet, devastating dignity: *“This is her last Christmas here.”*
"You wanted to show a probate judge that Claire was abusive?" Jason asked, his voice shaking with a cold, controlled fury that was far more frightening than screaming. "Any family court judge in the Commonwealth would issue a permanent restraining order against you based on this twelve-second clip alone. It’s textbook child endangerment and emotional abuse."
"Delete it," Evelyn whispered, her fingernails digging into the edge of the desk so hard one of her acrylic tips snapped off with a sharp *crack*. "Jason, delete it right now."
"No," Jason said. "And that's not even the interesting part."
He opened a secondary folder on the right-hand screen labeled *Vance_Archive_Restricted*.
Dozens of scanned documents appeared. Wire transfers. Promissory notes dated November 2021. Offshore escrow accounts in the Cayman Islands registered under Paul’s maiden name. And most damning of all: an internal email from Arthur Vance sent three days ago.
May you like
Jason read it out loud, his voice cutting through the room like a scalpel:
*‘Evelyn: The court auditor will not accept the trust deficit without an emergency conservatorship declaration signed by the beneficiary. If Claire refuses to sign on the 26th, you are exposed to statutory embezzlement charges under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 266, Section 30. The minimum mandatory penalty for trustee theft exceeding $250,000 is five to ten years in state prison. Secure her signature tonight, by any means necessary.’*
