Chapter 8 - Breaking the Lock
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I desperately wanted to tell her everything right then. I wanted to reveal the massive reality of Hartwell Precision, summon my army of corporate attorneys, and place armed security guards at every single entrance of my house to protect her.
But the constant fear had made Sophie hyper-alert in a way that sudden comfort might undo. She had taken a massive, terrifying risk just by bringing me the box. I needed her to know that I explicitly trusted her judgment before asking her to trust the sheer magnitude of mine.
“I will protect the box, Sophie,” I promised, looking deep into her fearful eyes. “And I will protect you.”
She embraced me so suddenly and fiercely that I nearly lost my balance. For a fleeting moment, she was seven years old again, climbing into my bed for safety during a violent thunderstorm.
Then she pulled away, wiped her face, and hurried out the door into the night.
After her taillights completely vanished down the dark street, I carried the heavy wooden box out to Daniel’s old, grease-stained workbench in the garage.
I tried three ordinary, gentle methods to open it before finally losing my patience and breaking the brass lock entirely with a heavy steel punch and a hammer.
Inside the box were official corporate seals, complex tax records, several encrypted USB storage drives, quality inspection certificates, and formal incorporation papers for a company called North Star Transit Solutions.
Sophie was legally listed as the founder, sole shareholder, managing officer, and personal financial guarantor. Her signature appeared clearly on the bottom of every single page.
At first glance, the documents looked perfectly legitimate. Then I noticed the specific dates next to the signatures.
Sophie had supposedly signed one major financial agreement in Atlanta while we were together attending a memorial service in Savannah. Another critical document had been notarized in Nevada on the exact day she was heavily medicated and recovering from minor surgery in an Atlanta hospital.
I inserted one of the encrypted drives into an isolated, secure laptop I kept in the garage.
The digital files contained massive shipment manifests for aviation components, along with final approval certificates bearing Sophie’s electronic signature. Several specific batch numbers perfectly matched products that Ashford Aeronautics had previously reported as "destroyed" after failing critical safety inspections.
Yet according to the North Star records on the drive, those exact same flawed components had been secretly relabeled, officially approved by Sophie, and sold through shady foreign intermediaries for a massive profit.
Millions of dollars had moved silently through offshore accounts attached directly to Sophie’s name. Corporate taxes had not been paid. Critical safety reports had been blatantly falsified. Massive business loans had been guaranteed using assets she did not actually own.
If federal regulators discovered the scheme without understanding the complex internal structure, Grant could easily claim he had been completely deceived by an independent, rogue supplier. Sophie, legally listed as the company’s sole operating officer, would appear to be the sole architect of the massive fraud.
Celeste’s insults had not merely been casual cruelty. Grant and his mother had spent years intentionally making Sophie look fragile, forgetful, and financially incompetent to everyone around them. They were ensuring that when the truth finally emerged, the world would easily believe she had acted irrationally—or completely alone.
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My phone rang, shattering the silence of the garage. Elias sounded unlike himself.
“Vivian,” Elias said urgently. “Grant Ashford is currently standing in our main lobby. He is loudly demanding to see the chairwoman.”
