Chapter 4 - THE MINUTE THEY TRIED TO ERASE
Thomas called Detective Vega before responding to the anonymous number. He read the messages aloud,
including the warning about the records, while Emily watched the hospital monitor trace the steady rhythm
of her daughter's heart.
Rosa asked them not to arrange a secret meeting or visit the mansion. She recorded the number, contacted
the foundation's financial controller, and sent another officer to check whether the message described an
immediate threat.
At nine that evening, Claire Bishop finally answered from her sister's house. Her voice sounded scraped
raw from sleeplessness. She had written the messages, and the records box was safe in her sister's locked
garage.
“Victoria had security escort me out yesterday,” Claire explained. “They said I was on administrative
leave. My office computer was wiped while I stood in the parking lot.”
Claire had kept lawful working copies of invoices and reconciliation notes she had prepared before losing
access. She refused to send the files by text because their contents involved donor information and
deserved secure handling.
Rosa arranged for Claire to provide a statement and the documents directly. Thomas felt a brief pulse of
relief, then caught himself. A box of invoices might explain fraud, but it could not undo Emily's fall.
At Blackwell House, meanwhile, a private cleanup crew worked beneath emergency lights. Victoria's event
manager counted broken glasses, cataloged bent ornaments, and covered the fallen tree with a dark
protective sheet.
Victoria watched from the staircase, a bruise forming on her shoulder where the branches had struck. She
spoke to her attorney, Marc Bell, as though the entire catastrophe were an expensive scheduling problem.
“The public understands one photograph,” she told him. “A violent man. A damaged home. We don't need a
forty-minute documentary about an employee who lost her temper.”
Marc reminded her that investigators had asked for preserved footage. Victoria stared toward the camera
above the ballroom entrance. “The security system was down,” she said, emphasizing each word as if
repetition could alter the past.
What Victoria did not know was that the security cameras weren't the only lenses in the room. The gala
production company had run a private video feed to the charity's streaming portal.
Maya Chen, the technical director, had tested that feed at six. Her crew had stored a local copy on a
portable recording unit in case the live connection failed during the auction.
When Victoria demanded that cameras stop filming near the tree, Maya redirected the public feed as
instructed. But the recording system had already captured the beginning of the confrontation from its
wide ballroom angle.
Maya discovered the file the next morning. At first, she couldn't bear to watch it twice. The camera had
caught Emily beneath the presents, the cake striking her head, and the decorative pole flashing across
her back.
It also captured Thomas arriving through the far doors after Emily had fallen. The timestamp and unbroken
recording made the sequence unmistakable, even though the picture lacked the intimate detail of a
close-up.
Maya called Nora, the caterer, whose team had been working beside the service doorway. Nora admitted that
she had begun recording on her phone when she heard Victoria screaming.
“My video starts after Emily falls,” Nora said. “You can hear Victoria threatening her, though. Then her
father comes in. I kept the phone down beside my apron because I was scared she'd see.”
The women met at a twenty-four-hour café near the hospital rather than Blackwell House. They compared
what the cameras had captured without altering the originals, then contacted Detective Vega and offered
both files.
Rosa instructed them to retain the original devices and provide copies through the department's evidence
process. No one promised that video alone would settle everything; images, timestamps, witnesses, and
context still needed careful examination.
On Emily's second morning in the hospital, Dr. Shah found the fetal monitoring sufficiently reassuring to
begin discussing discharge. Emily would need follow-up appointments, wound care, and clear instructions
about when to seek urgent help.
Thomas had been awake for most of the night. He carried coffee he never drank and a bag of clean clothes
from Emily's apartment. He had washed the frosting from her hair with help from a patient nurse.
When Rosa arrived with the news of the recordings, Emily stared at her. “It exists?” she asked. Her voice
cracked on the second word. “Someone actually saw what she did?”
“We have material to examine,” Rosa said. “It appears to show the start of the incident and parts of what
followed. I can't comment on an outcome before the review.”
For Emily, even that cautious answer mattered. She had begun to fear that her own memory would be treated
as unreliable simply because Victoria had enough influence to speak first and louder.
Thomas asked whether the recording showed his defensive action clearly. Rosa answered that the initial
file showed Victoria moving toward him with an object; the continuation required comparison with Nora's
recording and witness statements.
“That's what happened,” Emily whispered. “He was trying to stop her from hitting him. He kept looking
back to make sure I was safe.” Thomas touched the back of her hand.
That afternoon, Maya arrived at the hospital with a small envelope. Inside was Emily's laminated
event-crew badge, found in the wreckage, and a photograph of Nathan taped to its back.
“I thought you might want this,” Maya said. “I saw your picture when they were picking things up. And I
wanted to apologize for turning that camera away when she told me to.”
Emily looked at the badge. On the reverse, Nathan stood in sunlight holding two cups of coffee, smiling
at whoever had taken the photograph. Her throat tightened, but she answered without blame.
“You didn't know she was going to hurt me.” She paused. “When you did know, you saved what you could.
That's what matters now.” Maya nodded, wiping a quick tear from her cheek.
Before leaving, Maya described a detail she had nearly forgotten. Victoria had ordered the production
crew to cut not just the camera feed but the microphone nearest the donor wall, minutes before the
confrontation.
“Why that microphone?” Emily asked. Maya shook her head. “I don't know. But someone was arguing with her
there earlier, and the microphone picked up a woman's voice saying, ‘Those transfers weren't
authorized.’”
Emily looked toward Thomas. Claire had warned her about the payments, but Claire had been barred from the
event. Someone else inside the mansion understood the accounts well enough to challenge Victoria openly.
At that moment Rosa's phone rang. She stepped into the corridor and returned with her expression
carefully controlled. Investigators had reached Northstar's registered office address. It was an empty
suite.
The company, however, was not a mystery. Its registration records listed a managing member who shared
Victoria Blackwell's family name, and the payments had passed through the foundation only days earlier.
Emily closed her eyes. The blow across her back, the deleted access, the camera order, and the fake
May you like
invoices began to form one ugly shape. She had refused to sign a lie, and Victoria had punished her for
it.
