Nia looked up.
"Whatever you're doing, whatever you found in those papers..." Ruth's voice was steady. "...you be careful."
Nia studied her grandmother's face and read what was there. "What happened?"
Ruth told her. Nia's expression didn't break; it focused—sharper, cleaner, the way a lens looks when it stops searching and locks in. She turned back to her desk.
"I'm not staying away," she said.
Ruth already knew that. She'd known it since the courthouse steps. She sat down in the chair by Nia's door anyway, the one she used to sit in when Nia was small and had nightmares, and stayed there—quiet and present—while her granddaughter worked.
The anonymous phone call to Ruth's house didn't make the news. It didn't need to. It made its mark in the only place that mattered: inside the apartment on the South Side. In the careful way Ruth started checking the deadbolt twice each night, and in the way Nia began keeping her notebook tucked inside her backpack instead of on the desk by the window.
Someone knew what she was doing. That meant what she was doing mattered.
The morning after the call, Nia arrived at the library forty minutes before Ethan. She used the time to go back through the March 9th access log entry she'd flagged the week before—the one showing unusual login activity on the charity account sub-partition five days before the prosecution's claimed start date. She'd been treating it as a timeline discrepancy; she was beginning to think it was something more than that.
The entry didn't show a failed login. It showed a successful one. Whoever accessed that partition on March 9th got in without triggering a security alert, which meant they used valid credentials. The question was whose.
When Ethan arrived and settled across from her, she slid the printed page toward him without preamble. "Can you get me the full credential audit log for the charity account system? Not just the access summary—the raw log. Every user ID, every timestamp, every session duration."
Ethan looked at the page. "My IT team archived everything when the investigation started. I can request it."
"Request it today," she said. "And ask them specifically for the session tied to March 9th. I want to know how long the login lasted and what actions were performed during that session."
He pulled out his phone and sent the message while she was still talking. That was something she'd noticed about him in the past week: he had stopped second-guessing her requests. He just moved.
"The prosecution's forensic accountant," Nia continued, "submitted findings based on transaction records. But transaction records are the output. The log is the process. If the log shows actions during that March 9th session that align with the unauthorized transactions, then either the forensic accountant missed it, or they had it and didn't disclose it."
Ethan was quiet for a moment. "And if they had it and didn't disclose it?"
"Then they withheld evidence that could exonerate you," she said flatly, without hesitation. "That's a different kind of problem for them."
He leaned back in his chair. "You know, when you say things like that, you sound exactly like..." He stopped.
"Like a lawyer?"
"Like someone who's been doing this for twenty years."
She allowed a small shrug. "My mom used to say the law doesn't care how old you are. It only cares whether you're right."
He nodded slowly. And for a moment, the two of them just sat with that: the memory she'd offered, and the space he gave it.
The IT audit logs arrived the following morning. What they showed made Ethan's stomach drop.
The March 9th session had lasted thirty-seven minutes. During that window, a series of account mapping changes had been made: not transactions, but structural modifications that rerouted how future transactions would be categorized and recorded. In plain terms, someone had quietly rearranged the accounting architecture so that subsequent fund movements would appear, on the surface, to originate from Ethan's primary access tier.
It was sophisticated. It was deliberate. And it had been done with Victor Hale's login credentials.
Ethan sat with the logs in his hands for a long time before he called Nia.
"Victor," he said when she picked up.
"I know," she said. "I figured it was either him or someone who had access to his credentials."
"He was my partner for six years."
She didn't fill the silence with reassurance. She let him sit in it, which he later recognized as exactly right.
"I need you to understand something," he said finally. "Victor grew up with even less than I did. We built this company together from nothing. If he did this..." He stopped again.
"If he did this," Nia said carefully, "we still don't know why. Knowing someone did something and knowing why they did it are two different questions. Right now, we only have the first one." She heard him breathe. "Focus on the logs," she said. "We need to know whether the prosecution had access to them before filing their forensic report."
That became her primary objective for the next several days: cross-referencing the disclosed discovery documents against what the IT logs revealed. It was painstaking, repetitive work. She did it at the kitchen table after homework under the kitchen light while Ruth watched television in the other room with the volume low, one ear always tilted toward the kitchen.