Chapter 7: A Vote I Never Cast
The signature at the bottom of the proxy resembled mine. I enlarged it until the letters broke into pixels, then set the phone facedown on my hospital blanket.
“I didn’t authorize Daniel to vote for the trust,” I told Maya.
“I know,” she said. “We need to tell the registrar in writing.”
My wrist still hurt where it had scraped the floor. The dizziness had eased, but it returned whenever I tried to sit up too quickly. Across the room, Jada stopped sorting the screenshots she had saved from the livestream.
“Does that paper cancel the vote you cast?” she asked.
“Not yet,” Maya said. “The registrar flagged the conflict. Evelyn’s ballot is still recorded. The question is how they’ll treat both submissions when the election closes.”
I picked up the phone again. The proxy named Daniel as the person authorized to vote the Mercer Stewardship Trust’s shares. It selected candidates other than the two I had chosen. Beneath my apparent signature was a date from before the wedding.
For a moment, I tried to account for every document Daniel had put in front of me that week: the reception invoice, the travel forms, the stack he had called routine household paperwork. I could remember signing some of them. Memory alone could not tell me what this page was.
Maya opened her laptop.
“I’m going to say you dispute both the signature and any claim of authority based on this document. We’ll ask them to preserve the file as received, its submission history, and any communications about it. They need to verify authority independently, not ask Daniel whether he had it.”
“Ask them to preserve my ballot receipt, too,” I said.
“It’s in the draft.”
She turned the screen so I could read every line. There was no accusation of forgery. There was no claim that Daniel had submitted the proxy himself. I was grateful for the care, even as part of me wanted to type his name in capital letters.
Maya sent the notice from her own account and copied the trust’s counsel through our restricted channel. Then she called the registrar while I listened.
“My client’s vote must not be replaced on the strength of a disputed image,” she said. “Please confirm the conflict remains flagged, and tell us what your office can preserve from the submission path.”
She paused, writing on a legal pad.
“Yes. The complete received file, not a newly generated preview.”
When the call ended, she read back the registrar’s answer. The ballot and proxy would remain in the record, with the conflict held for review. The registrar had not accepted the proxy as an instruction superseding mine. Its staff would check their intake records and seek independent confirmation of any claimed authority before determining how the trust’s shares could be counted.
It was a hold, not a victory.
Jada exhaled.
“Can we at least say publicly that they caught it?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I don’t want someone online deciding the election happened tonight.”
The regular board election was still open. Other shareholders had votes to cast. Daniel’s suspension had been the independent directors’ decision, not the result of my ballot. I had spent that afternoon watching people turn those separate events into one story because it was easier to share.
My phone buzzed with a message from an account I didn’t recognize.
Jada glanced at it before I could turn the screen away. A reporter wanted the trust’s beneficiary records. He said publishing them would settle claims that I had invented my authority after the wedding.
“I’m not sending those,” Jada said.
“He asked you, too?”
“Three people have. One offered to blur the addresses.” She locked her phone. “I told them the beneficiaries aren’t characters in my documentary.”
I thought of the restricted folder where I had saved my ballot receipt. Trust counsel and the registrar had verified my authority through records meant for that purpose. None of the people whose interests the trust held had agreed to become evidence for strangers on a feed.
“Thank you,” I said.
Jada sat beside the bed. Her eyes were red from staring at screens since the night before.
“I keep thinking that if I put enough out there, people will stop believing him.”
“Some might,” I said. “Then they’ll want one more thing.”
She nodded and slipped her phone into her pocket.
Maya was studying the proxy beside the cropped spousal acknowledgment Daniel had sent earlier. On the acknowledgment, the visible text referred to his personally held Sterling shares and a transaction number. The part about claims to proceeds ran off the edge of the photograph. We still had not seen the complete packet or an original signature.
“This one isn’t the same document,” she said, turning the laptop toward us. “And it isn’t doing the same job.”
I leaned forward carefully.
“The acknowledgment concerns what Daniel says you agreed to about his own shares and the transaction,” Maya said. “We don’t know its full terms, or whether you signed it. The proxy claims to give him a way to cast votes belonging to the trust. Your marriage couldn’t do that for him.”
He had called me a convenient wife. I had assumed he meant someone who would smile beside him at company events and sign what he put in front of her. The two documents suggested different uses for my name. One reached toward his holdings; the other reached toward votes I held as trustee.
“Could the acknowledgment be attached to the proxy somewhere?” I asked.
“We’ve asked for the complete files and their submission histories. Right now, we can’t establish that connection.”
She placed the images side by side again. My name appeared on both. That was the only link we could see for certain.
A knock came at the door. A nurse checked my wrist and asked whether the dizziness had changed. I answered while Maya closed the laptop. The nurse reminded me that the doctor would speak with me when the remaining test information was available. She did not offer a result, and I didn’t press her to guess.
After she left, I found my wedding ring in the pocket of my hospital gown. I had put it there earlier because I couldn’t bear to feel its weight on my hand. I held it between two fingers, then set it beside the water cup.
Maya called Helen Ortiz. She introduced the issue as a disputed instruction in the ongoing shareholder election and explained what we had asked the registrar to preserve.
“I want to be clear,” Maya said. “We have no basis to tell you who submitted it.”
Helen’s voice came through the speaker, low and tired.
“Understood. Our review needs to look at whether company systems or personnel were used, if the registrar’s records point that way. That’s a separate question from whether the proxy is valid.”
“And from the directors’ decision about Daniel,” Maya said.
“Yes. His suspension remains in place while the outside reviewers do their work. We won’t use this image as a finding against him, and we won’t restore his access because he says it’s legitimate.”
Helen said interim leadership had been told to preserve relevant company records. The questioned vendor payment remained on hold. Finance was still checking the bank side of the morning’s batch, and the outside reviewers had not established who benefited from the proposed payment or whether the supporting work had been done.
“People here are scared,” Helen added. “They hear ‘investigation’ and wonder if they’ll still have jobs.”
I thought of the employee whose name Maya had removed from my chronology. For six months, I had asked questions about rising outside-services spending and slipping project dates. Those questions had not given me a right to make someone else’s life public.
“Please tell them the hold is on the questioned payment,” I said. “Not payroll.”
Helen’s reply was immediate.
“That’s still the plan.”
For nearly an hour, nothing happened. Jada persuaded me to eat half a sandwich. Maya stepped into the hall to return a call, and I watched the sky darken beyond the hospital window. Yesterday, I had been getting ready for my wedding. Tonight, I was waiting to learn whether a piece of paper could speak in my place.
At 7:24, the registrar sent Maya a written acknowledgment. My ballot was retained with its timestamp. The later proxy was sequestered as a conflicting submission and would not be treated as replacing my instruction while authority was reviewed. The registrar had also preserved the file it received and its available intake data.
Then Maya’s phone rang.
She answered, listened, and reached for her legal pad.
“Does your record identify the individual user?” she asked.
A pause.
“No. Please send the technical description exactly as your staff has it.”
When she hung up, she stayed still for a moment.
“The proxy came through a document relay registered to Sterling,” she said. “A corporate governance submission path.”
Jada looked from Maya to me.
“So Daniel sent it from work?”
“We don’t know,” Maya said. “The relay records which company channel delivered the file, not who put it there. It could have been uploaded by someone with access. It could have been queued earlier. The registrar hasn’t determined that yet.”
I looked at the pre-wedding date beneath my name. It told us what the document claimed about when I signed, not when the file entered the company system. The registrar knew the file had arrived after my ballot; everything before that required records we had not seen.
“The spousal acknowledgment came in a transaction packet,” Maya said. “This proxy came through a company route for governance documents. Whatever the explanation, it didn’t simply arise because Daniel was my husband.”
Helen was on another call when Maya tried her. Maya sent the registrar’s description through Sterling’s legal contact and asked that the company preserve access logs, upload records, service-account activity, and any queued files associated with that relay. She asked the registrar for its own complete delivery log.
We had spent the day trying to keep one payment from going out. Now I wondered what else might already have gone through a system no one had thought to check.
At 8:41, a message arrived from Helen. She had forwarded a notice from Sterling’s systems team, generated during its routine retention review.
May you like
Maya read the first line, then gripped the edge of the laptop. I leaned over to see it.
The temporary access logs for the same document relay—including the hours surrounding the proxy’s submission—were scheduled for routine deletion at midnight.
