He froze. “The efficiency protocol? The one you’ve been building in your spare time? The one that optimizes supply chains by 40%?”
“That’s the one. I never filed it through the company server. I built it on my personal drive.”
“It’s brilliant,” Trent said, leaning in. “If the partners knew about it…”
“They won’t,” I cut him off. “Not yet. But my parents… they sniff out money like sharks. If they know this exists, or if they think it belongs to the family estate, they will bleed it dry. I need to make sure my name is on it in a way they can’t touch. And I need to do it retroactively.”
Trent nodded slowly, understanding the gravity. “We can timestamp the original code blocks. File the intellectual property rights directly to you, dated from creation. It’ll bypass the company clause because you did it off-hours on personal hardware. I can witness the filing.”
“Do it,” I said. “And Trent? I need access to the public records database. The paid tier.”
He didn’t ask why. He just typed in his credentials.
For the rest of the afternoon, I didn’t write code. I dug.
I started with the obvious: my parents’ bank accounts. Or rather, the ones they thought were private. My mother was the treasurer for the Greenleaf Charity Gala, a local prestige event. My father was a ‘consultant’ for small businesses. Melissa was… well, Melissa was a spender.
I pulled tax records. I pulled credit card statements linked to our home address. I pulled email archives from the shared family cloud they thought I didn’t have the password to.
What I found wasn’t just mismanagement. It was criminal.
There were “loans” taken out in my grandmother’s name three years after she died. There were invoices for “event coordination” from the charity gala paid directly to a shell company registered to Melissa—funds that were used to buy designer handbags and trips to Tulum. My father had been taking “consulting fees” from contractors to overlook zoning violations on properties he managed.
It was a house of cards built on fraud, theft, and the arrogance of people who believed they were untouchable.
I saved everything. Every PDF, every receipt, every incriminating email chain where they joked about “dumb donors” and “easy money.” I compiled it all into a single, encrypted dossier.
