Chapter 10 - The Unopened Folder
The following Tuesday, a court-appointed courier arrived at my house to deliver personal items that Lauren had left stored in my basement from when she lived with me two years prior. By court order, everything belonging to her had to be removed from my property.
I dragged the three plastic storage bins into the garage, intending to pack them into a rental truck and drop them off at her defense attorney’s office.
As I taped up the second box, an old, beaten leather laptop bag slipped out from behind a pile of winter coats. It was Lauren’s personal MacBook—the one she had used until she upgraded six months ago. It had been sitting down there, forgotten.
Curiosity, sharp and cold, flared inside me.
Why had Lauren lost her mind so violently when Grace glanced at her phone? Grace had told me: *“I thought Aunt Lauren was watching a video on her phone. I looked for one second. She got really mad.”*
A child glancing at a funny video doesn't justify a beating. Not even for a narcissist like Lauren. It wasn't about disrespect. It was about *panic*.
I took the laptop up to my kitchen, plugged it in, and opened the lid. Because Lauren was notoriously lazy with security, the password was the same one she used for everything: her birthday.
The desktop popped open.
I opened the file explorer and searched for cloud backups synced from her mobile device. Most of it was superficial: selfies, shopping wishlists, wedding planning spreadsheets.
Then I found an encrypted folder labeled simply: *“EXIT PLAN.”*
I cracked the basic four-digit PIN using David’s anniversary date.
Inside were scanned bank statements, forged signatures, and fraudulent wire transfers spanning the last eighteen months. Lauren hadn't just been marrying David for love. She had systematically embezzled over $450,000 from Eleanor and Richard’s retirement trust fund, routing the stolen money into an offshore shell corporation.
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And right there, at the top of the folder, was an audio file recorded at 3:10 PM on the day Grace was attacked—five minutes before the plate broke.
I pressed play.
