Chapter 4 - THE WORK I HELPED HIM STEAL
Grant’s note made the house feel occupied even though the officers had confirmed he was gone.
He wanted me frightened.
He also wanted me focused on the missing laptop instead of asking what else remained.
In the attic, I noticed a clean rectangle in the dust beside the cedar chest. Grant had removed a second box.
It had contained my old client notebooks, tax returns, and backup drives from Mercer Strategy Group.
He knew exactly which records could show what work I had completed and what invoices he had invented.
Julian met me later at Dana’s office. Because of his recusal, he could not discuss the company investigation, but he could sit beside me as my brother.
“I recommended Grant for his first Crosswell position,” he said.
“I know.”
“No, you know I passed along his résumé. You don’t know that compliance flagged him two years later.”
Grant had submitted unusually high entertainment expenses and claimed they were necessary to win a hospital-network contract. The expenses were approved after he produced client confirmations.
Julian suspected the confirmations had been coached, but the clients verified them and no policy violation was proven.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You had just miscarried,” he said. “Grant said you blamed stress from the investigation. He asked me not to burden you.”
I had never told Julian about the miscarriage.
Grant had used one of the worst weeks of my life to keep two people from comparing notes.
Julian admitted another failure. When Grant’s division began outperforming forecasts, Julian supported his promotions because he wanted to believe the man I married had matured.
“I rewarded him for numbers you may have produced,” Julian said.
The sentence carried no accusation, but I heard one anyway.
I had produced some of them.
After leaving my career, I spent nights correcting Grant’s proposals, analyzing markets, and rewriting presentations. He called it helping the family. I called it temporary.
He presented the work as his own.
At first, I allowed it because his success benefited us both. Later, I continued because refusing led to days of punishment, financial restrictions, or violence.
The hidden truth did not divide neatly into victim and accomplice.
Grant had exploited me.
I had also helped create the professional image he used to gain authority over other people.
Dana asked whether any backups existed outside the house.
I remembered an online storage account I had stopped using after Grant complained that monthly subscriptions were wasteful. The password recovery email went to an address he did not know about—an account I created in college and rarely opened.
The storage service still existed.
Inside were partial backups from my old laptop, including the original sales forecasts and early invoices.
One folder was labeled GRANT—PERSONAL.
It contained bank statements I had never downloaded.
The statements showed payments from Crosswell entering Mercer Strategy Group, then moving into an investment account held jointly by Grant and someone named Rebecca Sloan.
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Rebecca was Crosswell’s vice president of procurement.
She was also Julian’s strongest competitor for the chief operating officer position he planned to leave the following year.
