Chapter 4 - I LET STRANGERS OPEN EVERYTHING

At 6:20 that morning, an assistant state’s attorney sat beside my hospital bed and asked for permission to access the entire archive.

Not just the files involving the basement.

Everything.

Photos.

Videos.

Messages.

Account histories.

Private recordings Ryan had forced me to make.

Things I had spent two years trying not to think about would now be viewed by detectives, prosecutors, digital-forensics analysts, and possibly a jury.

“You can say no,” Detective Chen told me.

“What happens if I do?”

“We keep investigating with what we have. But finding the dead-man system becomes harder.”

I looked at Emma.

She did not tell me what to choose.

That mattered.

Ryan always called pressure a choice.

Emma gave me an actual one.

I signed.

By eight o’clock, investigators had enough server access to begin copying the archive into a secured environment without changing the original data.

The first discovery came quickly.

There were folders named after me.

Hundreds of files.

But there were other folders too.

MIA

KELSEY

R17

JEN

Some were years older than my relationship with Ryan.

My stomach turned.

“He did this before me.”

Chen didn’t answer until her team confirmed timestamps.

“Yes.”

Ryan had always told me I was the first woman who made him jealous.

The first woman he loved enough to lose control over.

The abuse, he said, existed because I affected him differently.

Even his violence had been sold to me as proof that I was special.

The folders exposed that lie in under ten minutes.

Then investigators opened the release forms.

Each folder contained documents claiming the woman had consented to recording and distribution.

Mine had my signature.

Except I had never signed most of them.

One dated document placed me in Ryan’s basement on a Tuesday afternoon when payroll records proved I was working twenty miles away.

Another used a version of my signature copied almost perfectly from the lease we signed when I moved in.

Detective Chen stared at the screen.

“This isn’t only abuse.”

Emma said quietly, “It’s a business.”

Then the cyber analyst interrupted.

They had traced the second administrator.

Not to a name yet.

May you like

A Little Girl Kicked a Locked SUV—Inside Were Her Twin Brothers.

Six Rich Men Shaved My Head—Then My Husband Walked In.

Grandpa Chained My 6-Year-Old Outside—Then His Own Paternity Test Hit th...

To a residential internet connection in Naperville.

Linda Cole lived in Naperville.