Chapter 4: The Missing Entries
By the time I lowered my phone, Logan had gone quiet.
He watched me as if the missing page in my photograph were a trick I’d played on him. Grant stood between us—not blocking the doorway now, just close enough that Logan couldn’t pretend I was alone.
“You took a picture of a stack of papers,” Logan said. “That proves nothing.”
“It proves the page wasn’t there.”
“You don’t even know what those papers were.”
“I know what I’m looking at.”
For a moment, his face softened into the look he used when he wanted me to feel unreasonable. Then his phone buzzed. He glanced at it, and the softness vanished.
“Are you coming home tonight?” he asked.
I looked at the copy in his hand.
“I am home.”
His jaw worked. He tucked the agreement under his arm and walked past Grant without another word.
The front door shut hard enough to rattle the glass.
I stood in the hush he left behind, the phone hot in my palm. I had caught a hole in his story. I still didn’t know what lay beneath it.
Grant glanced toward the kitchen.
“Let’s see what the books say.”
An hour later, we were back at Lumina. The dining room was dark except for the blue glow of the bar’s under-counter lights. In the kitchen, the stainless steel had been wiped clean, but the air still held a trace of seared butter and citrus. The lunch rush had passed. The damage hadn’t.
Grant spread the bank exports beside our vendor ledger. I opened the folder of records I’d been building for three months, and the same dull panic began to climb my throat.
The numbers looked ordinary until they didn’t.
A payment to a supplier we used every week. A payment with the same vendor number, but a different description. Then another, weeks later, filed under a different expense category.
I traced each line with my finger.
“This one says equipment rental,” I said. “But there’s no rental in the ledger.”
Grant leaned over the table. “What date?”
I turned the page toward him.
He went still.
“What?”
“I remember that week.” He tapped the line. “Logan asked me to change an invoice description.”
I stopped moving.
“You never told me.”
“I didn’t think it was more than him trying to make the books look tidier. He said the category was wrong.”
“What did he want you to change it to?”
“Marketing. I told him I couldn’t change a description without a corrected invoice from the vendor.”
The fluorescent light hummed overhead. Somewhere behind the kitchen doors, ice shifted in the machine.
“And then?” I asked.
“He said he’d handle it.”
Grant’s voice tightened. “I should’ve told you he asked.”
“You refused.”
“I still should’ve told you.”
I looked down at the entries. The first time I’d seen those withdrawals, they’d felt like scattered bruises: a hotel, a gift, a transfer I couldn’t explain. Now there was a pattern in the spaces between them. The money hadn’t simply wandered out. Someone had tried to give it a costume.
I pressed my palm flat against the page.
“Can you remember which invoice?”
“Not exactly. But I remember the vendor number.”
He pulled the ledger closer and scanned the column. His finger stopped at a number repeated beside several transfers.
“That one.”
I searched the vendor list on my laptop. The number belonged to a company called Shoreline Advisory Group. I didn’t recognize the name. I typed it into the accounting system’s vendor profile.
A contact field appeared.
Helena.
For a second, the room seemed to tip—not dramatically, just enough to make me grip the edge of the table.
Grant read the screen over my shoulder.
“She’s listed as the contact?”
“Yes.”
“Does the company do anything for Lumina?”
“I’ve never hired them.”
I checked the ledger again. The company’s name didn’t appear there. Only its number, tucked into entries labeled with familiar, ordinary expenses. No invoices. No contract. Nothing that told me what service had supposedly been provided.
The name sat on the screen like a door with no handle.
I called Priya, the accountant who had helped me set up Lumina’s books. It was after hours, but she answered on the fourth ring. When I explained what I’d found, she didn’t interrupt. The small scrape of a pen came through the phone.
“Send me the exports and the ledger pages,” she said. “I’ll build a transaction timeline by date, amount, and recorded description. I can’t tell you from a name alone what the company did, but we can separate what’s documented from what’s only assumed.”
“Can you tell whether the descriptions were changed?”
“Not from these pages. I’ll check what records we have. For now, preserve each version you’ve got.”
“I will.”
I heard the carefulness in her silence.
“Camille,” she said, “don’t turn a contact field into a conclusion. But don’t ignore the mismatch, either.”
“I won’t.”
When I ended the call, Grant had already started matching dates. We worked without speaking for several minutes, trading pages across the table. I wrote each transfer onto a clean sheet and left a space beside it for what we could actually verify.
I wanted the lines to spell out an answer. Instead, they made a trail.
Then my laptop chimed.
A new transaction had appeared in the account activity.
I leaned toward the screen.
Grant’s chair scraped back. “Is that one of the old entries?”
“No.”
The posting time was minutes ago. The same unfamiliar company number sat beside a fresh transfer, its description dressed in the same harmless language as the others.
For one breath, I couldn’t move. My hands had gone cold against the warm metal edge of the laptop.
Grant looked from the screen to me.
“Camille—”
“I see it.”
May you like
The bank page refreshed. The new line stayed where it was.
Someone still had a way into the account.
