Chapter 11 - The Password
“You used my account.”
Mom shook her head.
“I used it once.”
Rachel turned her laptop around.
“Twenty-seven times.”
Mom stared at the screen.
The timestamps stretched across three years.
My name everywhere.
“I didn’t do all of those.”
Noah asked, “Who else had the password?”
Mom looked toward Michael.
“Don’t you dare.”
“I wasn’t going to say you.”
“Then who?”
“Richard.”
Years earlier, Diane had given Richard my credentials when she needed him to upload tax documents after Dad became ill.
She never changed them.
Richard had a perfect cover.
A family in chaos.
A grieving daughter who avoided finances.
A widow willing to bend rules.
A son angry enough to accept money.
And later, a husband easy to blame.
But Diane still participated.
She approved false invoices.
She used my trust.
She planted evidence against Noah.
Richard did not make her do those things.
She kept trying to separate what she had done from what he had done.
“You don’t get smaller because somebody else was worse.”
She looked at me as if I had slapped her.
That evening, police located Richard.
He had not fled the country.
He was at his lake house forty minutes away.
Before officers reached him, smoke was reported from a detached office on the property.
No one was hurt.
The sprinkler system contained it.
But boxes of old financial records had been stacked inside.
Richard claimed an electrical problem.
Investigators disagreed after finding evidence the fire started in two places.
The recovered boxes included one document that should have been destroyed.
A partnership agreement between Richard and Westbridge Consulting.
Diane’s signature appeared at the bottom.
Dad’s signature was genuine.
I stared at it.
“Then he was part of it.”
Rachel shook her head.
“Read the date.”
The agreement had been signed before Westbridge ever received a dollar.
At the top, Dad had written one note by hand:
TEMPORARY. SIX MONTHS ONLY.
At the bottom, beside Diane’s signature, someone had added later:
May you like
EXTEND INDEFINITELY.
The handwriting was hers.
