The office lights on the top floor of our downtown Columbus headquarters were dimmed to a moody

The federal building in downtown Columbus was a monolith of cold gray concrete and tinted glass, standing like an unyielding fortress against the gray Ohio sky.

Daniel had driven me downtown, sitting beside me in the quiet waiting room on the fourth floor while we waited for Special Agent Miller—no relation to the Dublin police sergeant—to call us back. We hadn't spoken much during the drive; the silence between us was heavy, filled with the ghosts of everything unsaid, yet it was a companionable silence, rooted in a shared purpose rather than cold estrangement.

“Lauren Mitchell?” a sharp voice called out from the doorway of Interview Room B.

A tall woman in a sharp navy blue suit, with keen gray eyes and hair pulled back into a tight bun, stepped into the hallway. She looked like someone who hadn't slept in three days, her briefcase bulging with printed financial ledgers and encrypted data logs.

“I’m Special Agent Vance—no relation to Marcus,” she added with a dry, humorless smirk as she noticed the brief flicker of surprise on my face. “Right this way, Mrs. Mitchell. And Mr. Mitchell, you’re welcome to join us, or you can wait out here.”

“I’m going in,” Daniel said immediately, standing up and taking my hand. This time, his grip was firm, solid, and unwavering.

We stepped into the small, sterile interview room. A metal table sat in the center under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights, flanked by recording equipment and a laptop displaying lines of decrypted server logs.

“We’ve spent the last fourteen hours decrypting the data packet your burner phone relayed to our servers,” Agent Vance began without preamble, sitting down across from us and opening a red folder. “The financial trail is staggering. Over two million dollars siphoned from regional accounts through shell companies managed by a dummy corporation in Delaware—a corporation registered under Cole Whitaker’s maiden name and Marcus Vance’s secondary social security number.”

“And my terminal?” I asked, leaning forward slightly. “The unauthorized wire transfers?”

“Injected remotely using administrative override codes stolen from your login credentials last Thursday night while you were at the holiday party,” Agent Vance confirmed, looking up from the folder to meet my eyes directly. “You were set up from day one, Mrs. Mitchell. Marcus needed an employee with a clean, predictable record—someone whose personal life was showing a slight crack of vulnerability—to serve as the digital patsy if internal audits ever flagged the missing capital.”

Daniel’s jaw tightened visibly beside me. “They used my wife’s marital boredom as a weapon.”

“They did,” Agent Vance agreed bluntly. “And it almost worked. If you hadn't managed to secure that physical drive from David Keller, and if Mrs. Mitchell hadn't executed that relay protocol, Marcus would have successfully shifted the entire federal indictment onto her desk by Monday afternoon.”

She slid a document across the metal table toward me. It was a formal exoneration notice, coupled with a subpoena to testify as a key prosecution witness against Marcus Vance and Cole Whitaker in the upcoming federal grand jury proceedings.