My stomach turned.
It wasn’t just a typo.
It was fucking sabotage.
“Remi?” I asked, holding the file in one hand, phone in the other. “You touch this grant application?”
She looked up from the couch, eyes rimmed with exhaustion. “No. Why?”
“Because someone did.”
Remi stood and crossed the room in two strides. I handed her the paper and watched her face as she read it.
“Holy fuck, Ava,” she whispered. “That’s not yours.”
“No. It’s not.”
She didn’t ask the next question.
Because we both knew exactly who would want to plant something like that.
It got worse.
That afternoon, one of our newer patients came in with bruises upher arms, eyes hollowed out from too many sleepless nights. She asked for Remi by name, but when I brought her into my office to check her in, she hesitated.
“Your security guard already asked me all this,” she said.
I froze. “What security?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. She said she worked with the clinic. Blonde. Uniform. Not one I’ve seen before. Said she was helping with security upgrades.”
I smiled. Thanked her. Filed the information away like I wasn’t panicking.
Remi and I spent the rest of the day cross-referencing files and records. The camera feed on the back lot had mysteriously cut out two nights ago. The last footage available showed Erin Voss walking past it, and then nothing.
Gone.
No recovery.
No backup.
No cloud sync.
“Check your folders,” Remi said suddenly. “Your caseload… go. One by one. Make sure they’re untouched.”
We went through the clinic’s entire digital directory. Colour-coded spreadsheets, appointment logs, case notes, and signed disclosures. One of the folders had a signature I didn’t recognize. Two more had been backdated by a week.
My hands shook as I scrolled. “We’ve been hacked,” I whispered. “Erin’s not just sniffing around anymore. She’s rewriting our history.”
Remi opened a locked file from her laptop, the confidential list of outreach victims we’d referred to third-party housing shelters.
It was empty. Completely wiped.
“Shit,” she muttered. “This isn’t oversight. This is premeditated.”
We opened our grants ledger next. One file had a random line inserted, a wire transfer we never initiated. Another had an updated tax ID number with three digits off.
“She’s not sloppy,” I said. “She’s smart. Smart enough to know that if we discover it, it’ll look like we’re trying to hide something. That we’re... cleaning up.”
