Chapter 4
The company review produced nothing criminal.
At first.
Grant’s work was mostly clean.
His expense reports were boring.
His vendor files organized.
His performance reviews strong.
That almost reassured Sofia.
Then the IT director found something unrelated to company money.
Grant had used his corporate laptop repeatedly to access Sofia’s patient portal.
Lorenzo’s attorney immediately told him to stop asking the company team to investigate medical matters beyond preserving relevant logs.
“Different issue. Different process.”
Lorenzo disliked being told where his authority ended.
He obeyed anyway.
Sofia changed every password she had.
Banking.
Email.
Cloud storage.
Medical portal.
Even grocery delivery.
Small actions became proof of how much access Grant had accumulated.
Two days later, she noticed one more thing.
Her private checking account held less money than expected.
Not stolen.
Transferred.
Grant had moved several thousand dollars into their joint savings over the previous six months.
Every transfer was technically permitted under the account arrangement.
Each one left Sofia with less independent cash.
“I didn’t even notice.”
Lorenzo sat across from her.
“That was the point.”
She looked at him sharply.
“Don’t turn this into some mastermind story.”
He stopped.
She was right.
Not every bad thing needed to be part of one elaborate plan.
Grant could be controlling without planning ten steps ahead.
Eleanor could be cruel without being strategic.
They needed facts.
Not mythology.
The next fact arrived from Dr. Pierce.
Sofia’s earlier twenty-eight-week ultrasound had shown the baby dropping from the forty-second percentile in estimated weight to the nineteenth.
Not dangerous by itself.
But worth monitoring.
Dr. Pierce had recommended a follow-up.
The appointment was canceled through Sofia’s portal.
Rescheduled.
Canceled again by phone.
Then changed to the elite maternal-fetal center where Lorenzo had planned to take her.
Sofia frowned.
“I changed it there because Grant kept interfering.”
Lorenzo looked at her.
“You changed it yourself?”
“Yes.”
That was new.
Sofia had not simply been trying to attend a routine scan.
She had deliberately moved the appointment somewhere Grant did not control.
“Why that center?”
She looked away.
“Because Dr. Pierce told me to.”
“For the baby?”
A long pause.
“For me too.”
Before Lorenzo could ask what that meant, Sofia stood.
“I’m tired.”
She went upstairs.
He did not follow.
May you like
For the first time, he understood his daughter was still withholding something from him.
And she might have a reason.
