He asked me to carry in a letter.
I refused that too.
“You don’t get to use me to reach her,” I told him.
His shoulders dropped.
“I made one terrible decision.”
“No.”
I looked at him.
“You made a series of decisions while your daughter was lying injured on a kitchen floor.”
He flinched.
“I thought Marcus had lost control for a minute.”
“And then?”
“I thought if we could get Sophia treated without destroying him—”
“Stop.”
I had heard enough.
“She had thirty-one fractures.”
Richard’s eyes filled.
“I know.”
“No. You know the number now. That’s different.”
He had no answer.
The search for Marcus ended the next morning outside Louisville.
A state trooper found the missing SUV at a motel.
Marcus was arrested without a struggle.
By then, investigators had obtained search warrants for his apartment, office, and electronic accounts.
What they found turned Sophia’s assault from a horrible family crime into part of something much larger.
The original flash drive was recovered from a locked drawer in Marcus’s office.
He had taken it from our house.
It contained the same financial files Sophia had backed up online.
But there was more.
Spreadsheets showed how he had moved money through three affiliated companies.
Several documents bore Sophia’s signature.
Others carried Richard’s.
Some were legitimate.
Some were not.
A forensic document examiner later determined that several of Sophia’s signatures appeared to be exact digital reproductions from older paperwork.
The same microscopic pen skips appeared in places where no two handwritten signatures should ever match perfectly.
Richard’s role became more complicated.
He had not created the false signatures.
At least investigators found no evidence that he had.
But months earlier, he had discovered irregularities and chosen to handle them privately.
He had pressured Sophia not to involve lawyers.
He had allowed Marcus to remain in control of company accounts.
