Chapter 4 - Grant's Name on the Screen
Priya Shah's office occupied the third floor of a brick building in downtown Plano, above a bakery that filled the stairwell with the smell of cinnamon rolls. I had pictured lawyers' offices as cold rooms with black leather chairs and polished desks. Priya's reception area had comfortable chairs, a bowl of peppermints, and children's drawings pinned to one wall. Somehow, that made the meeting feel more serious, not less. Real people could be hurt by what happened in ordinary rooms.
Paige arrived ten minutes after us, carrying a laptop and a small box of printed records. She looked nervous until Priya introduced herself and explained that she was there to document facts, not to pressure anyone into a conclusion. Then Paige's shoulders relaxed.
Dad sat beside me. Across the table, Priya arranged the documents into separate piles: my savings transfers, the reserve account payments, the vendor registrations, and the copied invoices. She asked Paige to explain how the records had been obtained and where the originals were stored. She asked Dad which controls normally applied to the company account. Every answer went into a notebook.
"This is important," Priya said. "We do not assume that a suspicious transaction proves who committed a crime. We preserve the evidence, identify who had access, and let the records establish the sequence. If someone tries to destroy or alter records, we document that too."
I was relieved to hear an adult say the word evidence instead of drama.
Paige opened the first spreadsheet. Vantage Solutions Group had received five payments totaling $11,200. Northstar Advisory Partners had received three totaling $7,400. Two smaller payments went to a third business with no working phone number. The invoice descriptions were nearly identical: "operational support," "project evaluation," and "strategic consultation." There were no reports attached, no contracts, and no employees listed in the vendor records.
"Who registered Vantage?" Dad asked.
Paige pointed to a public filing. The company had been formed by an agent, but a private mailing address connected to the registration pointed to a suite leased by Grant Ellis. Dad stared at the name.
"Grant is our finance director," he said. "He's worked with me for nine years."
The room grew quiet. Grant was the man who took Dad's calls at two in the morning when a delivery truck broke down. He had attended my mother's funeral and brought a casserole we never ate because no one was hungry. He sent company holiday cards with handwritten notes. I'd met him often enough to know his laugh, his crooked tie, and the way he always called me "kiddo."
"You're sure?" Dad asked.
"The address is associated with him," Paige said. "That doesn't prove he controlled the business. It gives us a connection to verify."
Priya made a note. "We should assume that anyone whose name appears in these records may be innocent, complicit, or being impersonated. No accusations outside this room until we know more."
Dad nodded, but his hand had closed into a fist on the table.
Priya moved to the digital signatures. A forensic specialist had examined one invoice metadata report that Paige had preserved. The signature image itself had been copied from a legitimate purchase order signed by Dad months earlier. The embedded file information showed it had been inserted into a later document. That meant the signature could have been forged even if the name and handwriting looked right.
"Could Vanessa have done this alone?" I asked.
"Possibly," Priya said. "Could someone have used her credentials? Also possible. We need access logs, device records, bank records, and testimony. The key is not to decide the answer before we have it."
I disliked how reasonable that was. My anger wanted the answer to be simple. Vanessa had taken my college fund. She had said so with her own mouth. I wanted every other question to line up behind that one and point at the same person. But if Grant was involved, the story was wider than our house, and the truth might take longer than my anger wanted to wait.
Priya asked if we had preserved messages, bank screenshots, or pay stubs. I showed her the screenshots I'd taken and the digital receipt history from my grocery store deposits. She checked that the dates matched, then asked me to email copies directly to her secure client portal. She also suggested Dad open a separate custodial account for my future savings after the bank confirmed the disputed transactions were under review.
"Your money shouldn't have been accessible through household convenience," she told me. "This doesn't make what happened your fault. But we can put better protections around it now."
Her words settled somewhere deep in my chest. I'd spent the last two days feeling as though I had failed to protect something that was mine. Hearing an adult identify the failure as a breach of boundaries, not a mistake I had made, helped me breathe.
Before the meeting ended, Paige mentioned an email she had not included in the packet because she wasn't sure whether it mattered. The subject line was Friday cleanup. It had been sent from an account with Grant's name to a personal email address she couldn't identify. The message included one sentence: Once the reserve clears, there won't be a trail left for Daniel to follow.
Priya read it twice. "Do you have the original file?"
"A copy from the shared mailbox. I exported it before my access disappeared."
"Then we preserve that file and the export history. No one forwards it or posts it."
Dad stared at the sentence. "He knew I was going to review the reserves."
"Maybe," Priya said. "Or he knew an ordinary reconciliation was coming. We don't know the context. But this gives us a reason to seek the bank's records and the company's access logs through the proper process."
In the parking garage, Dad stayed beside the car long after he'd unlocked it. The day was clear and bright, but he seemed unable to see anything beyond the paper in his hand.
"Grant was at my wedding," he said at last. "He helped me start this company when I had one truck and an office in a rented shed."
"Could he have been helping Vanessa?"
"I don't know." Dad looked at me. "I wish I did. I wish there were a way to make a painful answer less painful by getting it quickly."
I thought about the laptop, the empty account, and the way Vanessa had smiled while explaining that my work belonged to the family. "She wasn't confused about my money. She knew it was mine."
"You're right." Dad opened the car door, then stopped. "I'm going to ask you something, and you can say no. Would you be willing to write a simple timeline of what happened with your account? Just what you saw and heard, in your own words. Priya can tell us if anything needs to be clarified."
I said yes. I wanted a record that couldn't be talked over or smoothed away.
That night, I sat at my desk and wrote the timeline carefully. I included the exact balance, the four transfers, Vanessa's words about family income, and the MacBook receipt I'd seen. I wrote down the time Dad arrived and the words he used when he noticed the company payments. I didn't add guesses about motives. I didn't call Vanessa a monster. I stuck to what I knew because the truth was strong enough without decoration.
When I finished, I checked the document against my screenshots and saved two copies. One went to Priya. The other went into the blue shoebox with my pay stubs and college brochures.
At 11:47 p.m., a new email appeared in my school inbox. The sender address was unfamiliar, and the subject line was Your father is asking the wrong questions.
The email contained no greeting. It had one attachment: a photograph of a company ledger, taken at an angle, with several rows circled in red. Beneath the image, a single sentence read:
**Vanessa didn't create Vantage. Ask Grant why he used her login.**
I forwarded it to Priya without opening the attachment on my phone. For a moment, I considered deleting the message and pretending that staying out of the investigation might make the house feel normal again. But normal had been the excuse everyone used to leave uncomfortable things untouched. I saved the original email, wrote down when it arrived, and resisted the urge to answer the sender. If someone wanted to steer us toward Grant, we needed to understand why, not reward them with a quick reaction.
Then I woke Dad. He read the email and called his attorney before he called anyone at the company.
May you like
Whoever was sending messages wanted us to suspect Grant. But I was beginning to understand that people who hid behind anonymous emails could be trying to help us, frighten us, or steer us toward a convenient scapegoat.
I wasn't going to let another person decide what I believed.
