Chapter 6: What the Second Footage Showed
The screen in the study was smaller than the one in the foyer.
Daniel pulled up the footage from the USB drive while Ruth, Margaret, Emily, and Thomas stood behind him.
Vanessa was still in the driveway.
The gate remained closed.
Daniel had sent a staff member to tell her, politely, that she was welcome to wait inside or wait in her car, but the gate would not open until he said otherwise.
The footage was timestamped eleven days earlier.
The time showed 11:47 p.m.
The camera covered the entrance to the estate's private records room — a locked office on the ground floor that held the Hargrove family's personal documents, historical correspondence, and the filing cabinet where Daniel kept hard copies of legal paperwork.
The footage showed Vanessa.
She had a key.
She let herself in, moved directly to the third cabinet from the left, and opened the bottom drawer.
She knew exactly where to look.
She spent four minutes inside.
When she left, she was carrying a manila folder.
"That's the cabinet where I keep correspondence from the estate solicitors," Daniel said.
He didn't raise his voice.
He said it the way a person states a fact they are still processing.
"The folder she took — that's where I filed the preliminary DNA documentation.
The results that confirmed Emily's parentage."
"She read it," Margaret said.
"She read it eleven days ago," Daniel confirmed.
"Which means she's known for eleven days.
And in those eleven days, she planned tonight."
Emily watched the frozen final frame of the footage — Vanessa walking back out through the records room door, folder under her arm, expression calm.
"She used your own key," Emily said to Daniel.
"She had access to my office.
I trusted her with it." He closed the footage window.
"I won't make that mistake again."
"The folder," Ruth said.
"Is it still missing?"
"I'll check." Daniel stood.
He was gone for less than three minutes.
When he came back, he set the manila folder on the desk.
"She put it back.
Sometime in the last week, she returned it." He opened it.
Everything appeared to be there.
"She didn't take it to keep.
She took it to read."
"And to confirm," Ruth said.
"She needed to know exactly what you had before she could decide how to stop it."
"By destroying Emily's credibility before Daniel could tell anyone the truth," Margaret said.
"If Emily had been dismissed tonight as a thief," Ruth said, "any claim she made afterward — about her parentage, about the letter, about anything — would have looked like desperation.
Like a disgraced employee fabricating a story for revenge." She paused.
"It was actually quite a clever plan."
"Don't," Emily said quietly.
Ruth looked at her.
"Don't call it clever," Emily said.
"She sl*pped me in front of thirty people.
She made them all look at me like I was something dirty." Her voice was steady.
"There's no version of that I'm willing to call clever."
"You're right," Ruth said.
"I apologize."
Daniel looked at the folder, then at Emily.
"I want to call the police."
"On what grounds?" Margaret asked.
"Breaking and entering the records room.
Theft of private legal documents, even temporarily.
Planting evidence.
The sl*p." He looked at Emily directly.
"That alone."
Emily held his gaze.
"What happens to her if you call them?"
"That depends on what she says and what her lawyer does.
But the footage from the foyer and the footage from the records room together — that's not nothing."
"Call them," Emily said.
May you like
Daniel picked up his phone.
And from the driveway outside, as if she somehow knew, Vanessa began knocking on the front door.
