“But they know we looked,” he said.

“They know someone decrypted the partition,” I corrected him. “They don’t know where we are, not precisely, unless they managed to ping the IP before I cut it.”

My hands were shaking as I pulled the USB backup drive from my pocket and slotted it into the port.

I dragged the wedding contract file and the raw ledger database into the local offline directory.

“Look at the clause again,” Liam said, pointing a finger at the screen. “Before we lose it.”

I opened the cached image of the wedding-day document, zooming in on the tiny, blurred text at the bottom.

The text was a legal rider, hidden beneath my father’s forged signature.

My eyes ran over the dense, cold paragraphs.

“Under Section 9 of the primary trust agreement,” I read aloud, my voice barely audible over the hum of the hospital air conditioner.

“Go on,” Liam said.

“In the event of the primary beneficiary’s death, or her permanent physical or cognitive incapacitation…”

I stopped, the words sticking in my throat.

“What does it say, Claire?”