Chapter 13 - The Missing Shares
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Naomi Price was a razor-sharp attorney who possessed zero tolerance for corporate obfuscation. When Adrian stalled, she immediately filed a formal legal demand to review all corporate records, specifically targeting Helixora’s capitalization table.
When the heavy binder of documents finally arrived at Naomi’s office, I sat across from her, completely stunned by what we found. The official records painted a devastatingly false reality: I owned absolutely nothing. Zero shares.
According to the heavily sanitized documents, Adrian was the sole founder and currently held thirty-one percent of the company’s stock after multiple rounds of dilution. My name appeared in the entire registry exactly once—on a deeply suspicious transfer agreement dated nine years prior. This fraudulent document brazenly stated that I had voluntarily assigned all past, present, and future equity interest in Helixora entirely to Adrian, supposedly in exchange for him assuming the bulk of our household expenses.
I stared at the signature at the bottom of the page. It looked flawlessly like my own handwriting.
But I knew with absolute certainty that I had never laid eyes on this document before in my life.
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Naomi calmly asked me where I had been on the specific date printed on the transfer. I frantically dug through boxes of old planners and calendars until I found the horrifying answer. On that exact morning, nine years ago, Adrian and I had sat in a bank manager's office signing a mountain of paperwork to refinance our home mortgage.
The fake stock transfer bore the exact same date. The signature hadn’t just been cleverly forged by hand; it had been digitally lifted and seamlessly copied straight from the mortgage documents. We had uncovered a digital forgery, a blatant act of fraud designed to steal my life's work.
