“I didn’t sign anything that week, but someone had access to your digital signature file,” Dana said. “Or someone had access to a physical document you signed for something else, scanned it, and handed it to Croft to Photoshop.” She closed the folder. The sound was like a gunshot in the quiet room. “We are going to fight the bankruptcy, Dana said. But if we want to win, we have to catch the spy because right now Derek knows your moves before you make them. He didn’t just guess that you were vulnerable. Someone gave him the blueprint to your destruction.”
I stood up. The panic had receded, replaced by a cold, hard rage. I wasn’t just being sued. I was being hunted from the inside. “I need to go back to the office,” I said.
“Be normal,” Dana warned. “Don’t fire anyone. Don’t scream. If you spook them, they go to ground. We need them to feel safe. We need them to make one more delivery to Derek. And then…” Dana smiled, a sharp, dangerous expression that made me glad she was on my side. “We feed them a poison pill.”
I walked out of her office into the bright afternoon sun. My phone was still buzzing with messages from terrified subcontractors. The world thought I was broke. My family thought I was finished. But as I got into my car, I didn’t feel like a victim anymore. I felt like a CEO who had a company to clean. I drove back to Haven Ridge, walked through the front door, and smiled at everyone I saw. I looked at their faces, wondering which one of them was selling my life to my brother for cash.
“Everything okay, boss?” Gavin asked, looking up from a blueprint. He looked concerned. Genuine.
“Fine, Gavin,” I lied, not breaking stride. “Just a clerical error. We will sort it out.”
I walked into my office and closed the blinds. Then I called our IT security contractor on my personal burner phone. It was time to set a trap.
Returning to the Haven Ridge office felt like walking onto a film set where the genre had suddenly shifted from a workplace drama to a cold war thriller. The physical space was the same—the exposed brick walls, the sleek glass partitions, the architectural models on the display tables—but the atmosphere had curdled. Before the lawsuit, the silence in the office had been the productive quiet of deep focus. Now it was the heavy, suffocating silence of people holding their breath. I sat at my desk, the door opened just an inch, watching my team through the gap. I had built this company on transparency. We had open-book management. We shared profits. I knew the names of their spouses and their dogs. But as I watched them work, a poisonous thought took root in my mind: One of these people was selling me out.
My lawyer, Dana Whitlock, had been clear. The specific data in Derek’s lawsuit—the 15% overage on the West Sector grading, the exact dollar amount of the contingency fund—could not have been guessed. It was internal data. It was protected.
I started tracking everything. I became a hawk. My eyes landed first on Gavin Rooks. Gavin was my senior project manager. He was a big, boisterous guy who had been with me for three years. He was good at his job, but lately, his behavior had shifted. In the forty-eight hours since the news broke, Gavin had been acting like a man with a secret. I watched him walk to the shared printer for the third time that morning. He glanced over his shoulder, snatched the papers from the tray, and practically ran back to his cubicle. He was sweating even though the thermostat was set to 70 degrees.
Later that afternoon, he knocked on my door. “Hey boss,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “I was just… I was looking at the cash flow projections for next month.”
“Why?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral. “Finance handles the projections, Gavin. You just need to manage the schedule.”
“Right, right,” he stammered. “It is just with the lawsuit and everything… I wanted to make sure the vendor payments for the steel delivery were secured. The supplier is asking questions.”
“The steel is paid for,” I said. “You know that.”
“Okay, good. I just wanted to double-check the contingency fund, just in case.”
He was fishing. He was asking about the exact accounts Derek was trying to freeze. When he left my office, I wrote his name on a notepad and circled it three times. It felt like a betrayal that physically hurt my chest. Gavin had been there when we won the Rivergate bid. He had popped the champagne.
That evening, a secure email arrived from Dana. Subject: Access Logs / IT Forensics.
I opened the attachment. Dana’s forensic IT specialist had pulled the server logs for the past two weeks. The email was brief: We found a localized download of the Rivergate Master Budget file. It happened last Tuesday at 2:10 in the morning. The user credentials used to access the file belong to Gavin Rooks.
I stared at the screen. There it was: proof. Gavin had logged in remotely in the middle of the night, downloaded the one file that contained the damning, albeit contextual, financial data. And three days later, that data appeared in my brother’s lawsuit. I wanted to fire him immediately. I wanted to march out there, throw the log in his face, and scream at him until he admitted how much Derek had paid him to stab me in the back. But I remembered Dana’s warning: Don’t spook them. We need to be sure.
If I fired Gavin now, the leak would stop. But I wouldn’t prove the conspiracy. I needed to catch the line flowing directly from my office to Derek’s lawyer. I needed to prove that the information didn’t just leave my building, but that it arrived on Miles Croft’s desk. I needed a trap.
The next morning, I called a mandatory strategy session for the senior leadership team. It was a small group, just four people: Gavin, looking pale and nervous; Laya Grant, my cost controller, a quiet, mousy woman in her late twenties who barely spoke above a whisper and was brilliant with spreadsheets; Marcus, the lead architect, who was currently sketching on his iPad and looked bored by the drama; and my executive assistant, Sarah.
I closed the conference room door and locked it. I turned off the overhead projector. I made a show of putting my phone in the center of the table and asked them to do the same.
“Listen,” I said, leaning forward, lowering my voice to a conspiratorial hush. “I am going to tell you something that cannot leave this room. The lawsuit is getting aggressive. They are trying to seize our physical records and our hard drives to fish for more evidence to twist against us.”
Gavin looked up, his eyes wide. “Can they do that?”
“They can try,” I said. “But I’m not going to let them. Tonight, I am moving the physical archives and the redundant hard drive backups.”
“Moving them where?” Marcus asked, looking up from his iPad.
“I have rented a secure climate-controlled storage facility in Boise, Idaho,” I lied. I said it clearly. Boise. Idaho. It was absurd. There was no reason to move files to Idaho. I could have moved them to a safety deposit box down the street, but Boise was specific. It was random, and it was a word that had never, ever appeared in any of our legitimate documents.
“Why Boise?” Laya asked softly.
“Because it is out of the jurisdiction,” I improvised. “And because my old college roommate owns the facility. It is the only place I trust. The courier is coming at 6:00 tonight. Until then, business as usual. Do not put this in an email. Do not text about it. This conversation never happened.”
I looked at their faces. Gavin looked terrified. Marcus looked indifferent. Laya looked down at her notebook and scribbled something.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get back to work.”
