#Chapter 37: Evidence

Emily By dawn, I was already back at my desk with a mug of tea I barely remembered making and a pit in my stomach that hadn’t moved in days. The office was quiet—most of the staff didn’t start arriving for another hour—but my fingers were already flying across the keyboard, combing through the login records again. Something hadn’t sat right with the last anomaly I flagged. The time stamp was wrong—not off by hours, but by seconds. Too clean. Too perfect. I scrolled back to a document I’d marked two nights ago and cross-referenced the metadata. Then again. Then again. There. The same file appeared on a terminal across the office two days after I last touched it. With my initials in the edit trail. Except I never logged into that machine. My breath caught. Slowly, I turned in my chair and looked across the shared office, through the glass panel where Iris liked to perch in the mornings. She wasn’t here yet. Good. I logged out of the shared system and walked the long wa