Chapter 3 - The Erasure Attempt
The next morning, after Sophie was discharged into my care, I drove straight back to the Whitmore Hotel. I needed to secure the CCTV footage before the Vance family's influence reached the hotel management.
When I entered the general manager’s office, I found a cold atmosphere waiting for me. The manager, a man named Mr. Henderson, was nervously drinking coffee while sitting next to a man I recognized—Julian Vance, my father’s younger brother and a board member of the hotel group.
"Evelyn," Julian said smoothly, standing up to offer a fake smile. "We heard about the unfortunate incident last night. How is little Sophie?"
"Where is the footage from the ballroom entrance, Mr. Henderson?" I asked, ignoring my uncle completely.
Mr. Henderson cleared his throat nervously. "Ah, Miss Vance... regrettably, we experienced a severe system malfunction last night. The digital video recorder for the grand ballroom suffered an isolated hard drive corruption around 9:00 PM."
I felt the air leave my lungs. "Corruption? That camera was blinking red. The system was active."
"Systems fail, Evelyn," Uncle Julian said with a sympathetic sigh that sent shivers down my spine. "It's tragic, really. Without objective video evidence, it’s simply your word against two hundred distinguished guests who saw your daughter with Preston's phone."
They had already reached the hotel. My family had erased the truth overnight.
"The police requested that footage," I warned.
"And we have provided the police with a formal technical report detailing the drive failure," Henderson replied, handing me a copy of a fraudulent maintenance log.
I stood there, feeling the crushing weight of the Vance family machine. They controlled the lawyers, the police contacts, the hotel management, and the public narrative. To the world, Preston was the victim of a petty theft, and I was the crazy sister who caused a scene.
As I walked out of the manager's office in defeat, a young hotel janitor pushing a laundry cart brushed past me. He dropped a folded linen napkin into my handbag without saying a word, then kept walking quickly down the corridor.
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I stopped near the elevators, pulled out the napkin, and unfolded it. Inside was a tiny USB flash drive and a scribbled note:
“They deleted the main server, but the secondary cloud backup for staff safety was untouched. Don't let them get away with it. - A friend from the kitchen.”
