pad.
“Do you still have access to the Silverline audit archive?”
Claire’s fingers tightened around the paper cup. “Yes.”
“Legal access?”
“Read-only. Old project permissions from before I rotated off. They never removed me from the archive.”
Mrs. Parker nodded once. The way she did it, slow and settled, communicated everything. “Then we do this clean,” she said.
The word clean mattered. It was a professional standard and a moral one. Claire did not hack into anything. She did not steal records or extract documents she had no right to view. She used credentials that were still legitimately attached to her name, credentials that had simply never been revoked, to view records she had once been assigned to review. She moved through the archive the way any auditor with appropriate access would move through it. Carefully. With documentation of every step.
Mrs. Parker opened her laptop and turned it to
