“Grant’s mother, Evelyn, keeps digital backups of everything,” Nathan said. “She doesn’t trust her son to keep his mouth shut, so she manages his dirty work.”

He turned the laptop toward me.

On the screen was a scanned document with my signature at the bottom.

It was a medical release form, dated two years ago.

“I never signed that,” I said, touching the screen. “That’s my handwriting, but I never signed a medical form.”

“It’s a digital composite,” Nathan explained. “They took your signature from your divorce papers and pasted it here.”

I stared at the screen, feeling the sheer weight of the Whitmore family’s wealth and influence pressing down on me.

“They can buy anything,” I whispered. “They can buy judges, doctors, police. How do we fight this?”

Nathan closed the laptop slowly.

He looked at his hands, his knuckles white against the dark wood of the table.

“You fight them by showing them you won’t break,” Nathan said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.

He looked up, and for the first time, I saw a raw, ancient pain in his eyes.