I stared blankly out the window. I let the nurses check my pulse and record my “unresponsive” demeanor. I perfected the vacant stare of a woman destroyed by grief.

By night I was the architect of their ruin.

The guest room closet became my command center. From one to four in the morning, while the house slept, I navigated the Aegis system. I didn’t need external forensic accountants; I had Grant’s own home network.

I couldn’t crack his laptop’s military-grade encryption directly — so I didn’t try. I used the smart-home microphones to record his keystrokes when he typed his master passwords, then ran the audio through an acoustic-analysis script I wrote to translate the clacking into letters.

It took four nights to get the password: V&G_Forever2024. So cliché it made me nauseous.

Once inside his local drives, the scale of his fraud unfolded like a map of a battlefield. Grant had built a web of shell companies. The licensing revenue from my fraud-detection engine — millions of dollars — was being funneled through consulting invoices into Apex Holdings.