Chapter 2 - The Audit TrailBy 3:00 AM, the lights in Evelyn’s study were the only ones burning on the upper floor of her ancestral home. The house smelled of old paper, polished mahogany, and the faint, cold draft of an autumn night rolling in off the harbor.
The screen of her laptop glowed with row after row of financial data.
Margaret’s team had worked through the night, dumping encrypted databases into a secure server. The digital footprints were glaringly obvious once someone actually looked. Ethan wasn't just a garden-variety cheater; he was sloppy. He had been using corporate shell accounts disguised as operational overhead to fund Sabrina’s luxury lifestyle at the Meridian Tower, complete with monthly wire transfers disguised as "logistics optimization."
Worse still, he had quietly attempted to reassign twenty thousand shares of restricted stock from a dormant family holding account into an unmonitored subsidiary—a direct violation of the non-alienation clauses Evelyn’s father had written into the corporate charter back in 1984.
Evelyn highlighted the transaction code, right-clicked, and selected the master revocation option.
With a single click, the stock transfer was blocked, the subsidiary accounts were frozen, and an automatic notification flashed on the desktop of every board member, signaling an immediate Level-1 forensic compliance review.
She leaned back in her leather chair, watching the cursor blink on the screen.
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Ethan wanted a younger woman who viewed marriage as a stepping stone and wealth as an entitlement. He wanted to discard the quiet woman who knew the history of every brick in the company.
He was about to discover what happened when the ghost woke up.
