Chapter 8
The tablet had lived on the nursery shelf because Cole said music helped the babies settle.
He’d set it up himself, linking it to our shared family calendar and the trust portal “for convenience.” I remembered Noah’s tiny fingers patting its dark screen while lullabies played, and Cole telling me not to move it. The memory no longer felt domestic. It felt like a door I’d left unlocked because my husband had asked me to.
“I don’t have the tablet,” I told Daniel. “It’s at the apartment.”
“Then we don’t go back for it,” he said. “Not with Cole knowing where you were before. Do you have an account backup from before you left?”
I thought of the little cloud icon that appeared whenever the tablet was plugged in overnight. “I think so.”
“Don’t sign in or change anything yet. I’ll connect you with an independent technician who can preserve an existing backup. No one should be making changes to the device or its records.”
The room smelled of lemon cleaner and warm dust. Lily slept in her carrier, her breath soft beneath the blanket. Noah’s fever had eased, but I still checked his forehead whenever the silence stretched too long.
Daniel stayed on the phone while I spoke with the technician. Her name was Mara. She explained what she could—and couldn’t—do in plain language, then asked me to confirm that the backup belonged to my account.
“I’m not trying to prove who touched the tablet,” I said.
“Good,” Mara replied. “A device record can tell us what accessed an account. It can’t, by itself, identify the person holding the device.”
The distinction was small enough to sound harmless. It landed like a weight.
Mara preserved the existing backup and made a separate working copy. I listened to her keyboard taps through the speaker, each one making the room feel more crowded. Daniel asked her to send the preserved records directly to him and the trust’s security team.
When the first summary arrived, I read it twice.
The tablet had opened the trust portal repeatedly. Some sessions fell late at night, after I’d gone to bed. One was recorded at an hour when I was certain I’d been asleep, Noah tucked against my chest in the nursery chair.
A second session came after I’d left the apartment with the babies.
I looked at the timestamp until the digits blurred.
“It was still there,” I whispered.
Daniel didn’t fill the silence. “The record shows the tablet accessed the portal. It doesn’t show who used it.”
My hand tightened around the phone. “I know.”
And I did. Knowing wasn’t the same as being able to make anyone else see it.
Mara found a folder of saved documents in the backup. One file was an image of my signature, cropped tightly against a white background. It had been saved on the tablet before the trust request was submitted.
My signature looked familiar. That was the point. The slant of the L, the little hook at the end of Bennett—someone had copied the parts that made it mine and left out everything that made it a choice.
I thought of all the times Cole had asked me to sign things while a baby cried, or while dinner burned, or while he stood between me and the door with a pen in his hand.
I had not signed this request.
But the image looked enough like me to make doubt feel plausible.
A message appeared from Sierra.
I wrote something down. I haven’t signed it. I need you to know what I did.
I showed Daniel.
“Don’t tell her what to say,” he warned. “If she sends it, preserve it as it arrives.”
The next message was a document. At the top, Sierra had typed Draft Statement. Below it, she admitted uploading the signature image after Cole told her it was authorized and said Lauren had approved the distribution. She wrote that Cole gave her the file and directed her to include it with the vendor paperwork.
At the bottom, the signature line was blank.
I read the statement again, then looked at the blank line.
“She’s still protecting herself,” I said.
“She may be,” Daniel answered. “A draft isn’t sworn testimony. It doesn’t prove who operated the tablet, either.”
I could hear Sierra’s earlier voice in my mind: If Cole finds out, he’ll say I did this alone.
Her fear didn’t make her innocent. It didn’t make her account true. But the blank signature brought back the same image I’d seen on the tablet: my name, reproduced without my consent, made to say what someone else needed.
I saved the document without replying.
“I can’t make her tell the truth,” I said.
“No,” Daniel replied. “But you can keep what she sent.”
Before I could answer, his phone chimed. He went quiet while he read, then asked the trust security team to confirm the device identifier.
“What is it?” I said.
“They’ve matched the request to a registered device.”
I stood so quickly the chair scraped against the floor. Lily stirred. I froze until she settled again, one hand resting on her carrier.
“Which device?”
“The old tablet,” Daniel said. “The request came through your registered device.”
My name was on the account. My device had opened the portal. The copied signature was sitting in its files.
For one dizzy second, the evidence I’d found seemed to turn around and point at me.
Then I heard Cole’s voice—not in the room, but still close enough to hurt. You’re exhausted. You’re paranoid. You don’t know what you’re doing.
May you like
The security team’s final message arrived while Daniel was still on the line.
Request originated from Lauren Bennett’s registered device.
