Chapter 11 - THE PERSON INSIDE
Only four people had legal access to Victor’s estate records.
Elena.
Nora.
Victor’s longtime accountant.
And the temporary probate administrator appointed before Nora took over.
The administrator was a man named Steven Cole.
He had worked with Reed Urban Development for years.
Nora immediately requested a review of every file he had accessed.
The results were alarming.
Steven had opened Victor’s confidential investment documents seventeen times.
He had downloaded copies.
He had also met privately with Genesis two days after Victor’s funeral.
When confronted, Steven resigned.
Hours later, he attempted to delete his email account.
He was too late.
Investigators recovered messages between him and Genesis.
One read:
She still thinks this is only about the apartment.
Another said:
Get the release signed before the conversion date.
Elena did not yet know what the conversion date meant.
But Genesis did.
The audit was due to conclude in eleven days.
If Victor’s loans remained unpaid, his preferred shares could convert automatically into voting control.
Genesis needed Elena’s signature before then.
The apartment and $300,000 served two purposes.
The cash would cover overdue company payments.
The deed would become collateral for another loan.
The legal release would erase Elena’s claim to Victor’s shares.
Jackson’s violence had not been random.
It had happened because time was running out.
Nora turned Steven’s messages over to police and the state financial crimes division.
Genesis responded by launching a public attack.
She told relatives that Elena was mentally unstable.
She claimed Elena had attacked Jackson first.
She called Elena a gold digger trying to steal the Reed family company.
Several family members repeated the story online.
Then a photograph of Elena leaving the hospital appeared on a local gossip page.
The caption suggested she had staged her injuries.
For one devastating day, Elena considered disappearing.
Then Marlene called.
“I stayed silent too many times in that family,” she said. “I won’t stay silent now.”
Marlene agreed to give a public statement.
Caleb agreed to testify.
And Elena’s employer released a message confirming she remained a respected senior consultant.
The smear campaign began to crack.
Then detectives discovered that Jackson had submitted a second loan application.
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This one used Elena’s Social Security number.
👉 By morning, investigators had connected the forged loan to an account Genesis publicly claimed did not exist.
