Chapter 3 - The Digital Vault
Saturday passed in a quiet, tense blur. Greer spent the hours nursing June, organizing medical paperwork, and preparing her defense. Every movement was calculated. She kept her phone on airplane mode most of the day, turning it on only in thirty-minute intervals to check for incoming traps from Landon or Evelyn.
By Saturday evening, the texts had shifted from casual check-ins to thinly veiled demands.
Landon (1:14 PM): Where are you? Mother went by the house to drop off soup and the smart locks are offline. Why would you change the codes when you’re supposed to be resting?
Landon (4:52 PM): Answer your phone, Greer. This is getting ridiculous. Harper came over to help organize the nursery for the upcoming investor catalog and she can't even get inside. Call me immediately.
Evelyn (6:05 PM): Greer, your behavior is becoming increasingly erratic. Landon is under a tremendous amount of stress with the upcoming product rollout. Please stop playing games and return home before you do permanent damage to your family.
Greer read the messages without feeling a single pang of guilt or hesitation. They were reading from a script—a script designed to paint her as unstable, erratic, and unfit. She forwarded every single message directly to Rachel Sloan’s secure legal file. The words "erratic" and "unstable" appeared with unnatural frequency across both Landon’s and Evelyn’s texts, confirming Rachel’s suspicion that they were actively building a psychiatric narrative to support Monday’s corporate coup.
At 9:00 p.m., after June had drifted off into a deep, peaceful sleep, Greer opened her laptop at the kitchen island of her cousin’s townhouse. It was time to secure the digital vault of Maddox House.
She connected to the private virtual private network (VPN) that tied directly into the company’s enterprise servers. Her heart hammered against her ribs for a brief second as the login screen loaded—if Landon had already revoked her primary credentials, the screen would flash red with an unauthorized access warning.
Instead, the screen blinked white, loaded her custom dashboard, and greeted her with the familiar blue-and-gold Maddox House logo.
Welcome back, Founder & Chief Creative Officer.
Landon hadn’t dared revoke her admin credentials yet because doing so would trigger an automated compliance alert to the corporate legal oversight committee—a safeguard Greer had personally insisted on writing into the company bylaws five years ago to protect her majority stake against hostile takeovers. He had planned to strip her rights legally during Monday’s ambush board meeting, meaning his IT department was legally barred from locking her out until the vote went through.
Greer immediately went to work. She navigated past the public marketing folders, past the brand strategy briefs authored by Harper Quinn, and straight into the core financial repositories.
What she found confirmed her worst suspicions about Harper’s infiltration.
Over the past six months, while Greer had been heavily pregnant and navigating a difficult third trimester, Harper had initiated a series of large-scale asset transfers under the guise of “brand restructuring.” Several high-value nursery franchise contracts had been quietly reassigned to a subsidiary shell company called HP Strategic Holdings. The primary beneficiary listed on the shell company’s articles of incorporation was not Maddox House.
It was Harper Quinn.
Landon hadn't just been replacing his wife at home; he had been systematically siphoning corporate assets and intellectual property to set up his mistress as an independent business partner behind Greer's back. The newborn photo session wasn't just a cruel domestic power play—it was a marketing dry run for a new corporate identity where Greer didn't exist at all.
Greer exported every transaction log, every shell company filing, and every internal email chain linking Landon and Harper to the asset diversion scheme. She saved three identical copies across encrypted cloud drives and a physical hard drive tucked securely into her carry-on bag.
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Her phone lit up on the kitchen counter. It wasn't a text this time. It was a direct FaceTime call from Landon.
Greer stared at the glowing screen, watching her husband's face appear in the caller ID thumbnail. He looked tired, slightly irritated, but utterly confident in the trap he believed she had walked into. She tapped the green accept button, propped the phone against a coffee mug, and waited for him to speak.
