👉 Previous choice: You chose Option A – Sneak into Maya’s car and show her the raw acoustic logs.
I moved quickly, darting across the lawn and slipping into the passenger seat of Maya’s car. She jumped, dropping her phone.
“Leo! What are you doing out here?” she hissed, fumbling to pick it up. Her eyes were wide.
“Julian,” I gasped, out of breath. “He framed me. Told Mom and Dad I’m having a breakdown.” I pulled out the USB drive. “He’s the one. The recording, Maya, it was made right inside the house.”
Instead of shock, a quiet recognition settled on her face. She reached into the back seat, pulling forward a battered three-ring binder. Its cover read “Financial Accounting for College Seniors.”
She flipped it open to a series of neatly organized printouts: bank statements, crypto wallet transactions, offshore shell company documents. “I know,” she said, her voice flat. “He’s been bleeding money for months. Over eighteen thousand five hundred dollars on sound isolation gear and encrypted satellite hardware. All through some shell company in the Caymans.”
I stared at the documents, my mind reeling. “But why?”
“Grandfather Carver’s estate,” she explained, tapping a page with a complex legal diagram. “The $1.4 million trust fund. It has a clause. Julian gets his share early, but only if there are no pending felony investigations against him before your eighteenth birthday.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. “Julian doesn’t have a felony record.”
“Exactly,” Maya said, a grim line to her mouth. “Because someone made sure it disappeared. But if you’re declared ‘incompetent’… if you can’t inherit your share… then it all goes to him. He was covering his tracks.”
A chill deeper than the night air ran through me. This wasn’t just about a podcast. It was about an inheritance. My inheritance. My life.
➡️ Read CHAPTER 6 to continue the story
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