Preparing to Strike

Three months.

That was the lead time Eleanor needed to scrub the existence of a foster child and replace him with a Vance. David didn't just stumble into my life; he was polished and staged for me like a model home.

I stare at the digital receipt on the shadow server. "Vital Records Adjustment." Fifty thousand dollars to buy a birth certificate that didn't belong to the man I spent fifteen years building a family with. My marriage wasn't a choice; it was a targeted acquisition.

I need the physical proof. The digital ledger tells me where the money went, but the original documents—the real birth certificate for the boy who actually died in 1998—are the only weapons powerful enough to break Eleanor’s hold.

The ledger has a column for "Physical Archive Location." Most entries are blank, but the 2002 identity purchase has a distinct code: *EV-Safe-B4*.

Eleanor’s study. The wall safe behind the portrait of Arthur.

It’s a biometric lock, backed up by a six-digit rolling code. I could never guess it, and I’m certainly not an expert at cracking heavy steel. But the ledger reveals a technical oversight. Eleanor’s safe is integrated into the estate’s smart-grid for "security monitoring." Every time it’s opened, it sends an encrypted signal to the main server to log the access.

If the signal can travel out, a command can travel in.

I open a terminal window, my fingers flying across the keys. I’m not hacking a bank; I’m navigating the admin protocols I helped maintain for years. I find the estate’s hardware map. The safe is listed as an auxiliary node.

I write a small script, a digital "handshake" that mimics a system-wide firmware update. If I can trigger a hard reset of the estate’s security hub while the safe is in a maintenance cycle, the lock will default to its factory bypass state for exactly sixty seconds.

I just need to be in that room when it happens.

I check the house monitors. David is in the living room, staring at the fireplace, a glass of amber liquid forgotten in his hand. He’s a passenger in his own life, waiting for the next instruction from the woman who bought him.

I need to move. Eleanor is hosting a charity luncheon tomorrow afternoon. The house will be full of guests, the staff will be distracted, and the study will be the only quiet corner left.

I scroll deeper into the 2002 file, looking for any other mention of the original David Vance. If Eleanor replaced a foster kid with her dead son, she must have a record of the swap.

I find a secondary directory buried in the encrypted partition, one that wasn't indexed in the main ledger view.

She clicked open a hidden sub-folder marked '1998 Incident.'