Chapter 6 - THE ORIGINAL SIGNATURE
Malcolm Price had once been a junior attorney with a reputation for turning messy property disputes into tidy settlements, but by the time Isabella began searching for him he had become a senior partner at a firm that specialized in defending developers against tenant claims.
Priya advised against approaching him without a clear purpose, because he represented interests potentially adverse to Isabella and any careless conversation could let him portray a witness contact as harassment or an attempt to interfere with legal proceedings.
Instead the team preserved Daniel's notebook, compared the purported signatures with authenticated service logs, and asked an independent document examiner to assess whether a pattern of copying existed across inspection certifications.
The examiner found identical pixel artifacts on three certificates supposedly signed months apart, consistent with the same scanned signature being inserted repeatedly, and a separate handwriting expert identified significant differences between the printed initials on those pages and Daniel's original handwritten entries.
These conclusions did not prove which person performed the alteration, but they seriously challenged the claim that Daniel personally approved the repairs, giving Isabella a concrete basis to defend her father's reputation without relying on what she wished were true.
On the same day, the hotel informed her that the employee who reassigned her shift had been suspended pending a workplace inquiry, while the manager who ignored her request for help had offered to resign before being interviewed by outside investigators.
Isabella insisted the inquiry continue, not because she wanted every careless employee punished, but because the institution needed to know whether its practices had encouraged silence around influential guests for years.
A woman named Rosa, another banquet worker, contacted her privately and explained that the hotel routinely allowed high-spending visitors to request particular staff by name, even when the employees expressed discomfort about prior interactions with those guests.
Rosa had once been told to serve a businessman who had repeatedly followed her after shifts, and although no assault occurred, her supervisor treated her fear as inconvenience until she threatened to quit.
The stories made Isabella realize her humiliation had taken place inside a system designed to protect paying customers from embarrassment rather than staff from danger, which was why the camera footage mattered beyond the fate of Adrian Vale.
Gabriel accompanied her to a meeting with representatives from the hospitality apprenticeship, where they proposed paid training on boundary enforcement, anonymous reporting, and independent follow-up, with Isabella insisting the program be designed by workers who understood what happens when a supervisor fears losing a wealthy client.
Their partnership was not uncomplicated: Gabriel sometimes wanted to fix every problem by offering money, while Isabella understood that funding without shared authority could create another relationship in which powerful people decided what safety meant for everyone else.
They argued about whether her continued involvement with the investigation was exposing her unnecessarily, and she told him that fear was not evidence she was making the wrong choice, although it was reason to be careful.
He admitted that seeing her in pain had made him want to control circumstances she herself needed to navigate, and they agreed to plan practical security measures without turning her life into a guarded residence.
That evening, Priya received a subpoena return in a related civil proceeding indicating that Glasswell Services had billed Vale Development for reputation management and record review immediately after the Riverside complaints became public.
One invoice described the creation of a corrective statement under Isabella's maiden name, using language almost identical to the statement Adrian had coerced her into signing years earlier.
This was the first documentary link between the fabricated complaint response and the company's payment network, although the original invoice still required authentication through business records and testimony from the people who approved it.
Meanwhile, the independent lending committee confirmed that Vale Development had submitted a collateral valuation materially higher than the buildings' supported market value, and a regulator opened a preliminary inquiry into suspected false statements supplied in connection with financing.
Adrian responded through his attorney with a letter denying wrongdoing, asserting that former employees had misinterpreted routine revisions, and accusing Gabriel of arranging a defamatory campaign after his wife encountered an old romantic acquaintance.
Isabella read the letter twice, noticing how neatly it erased her physical injuries and substituted a romance narrative for the recorded assault, then handed it back to Priya and asked to prepare an affidavit specifying which portions of her old statement were genuine and which had been altered.
She spent an entire afternoon reconstructing the date she visited Adrian's office to retrieve her laptop, including the blue pen he offered, the silent secretary in the outer room, and the fact that he made her sign only the last page of what he claimed was a private settlement.
The memories came unevenly, without the cinematic certainty of a perfect witness, and Priya assured her that acknowledging gaps would make the account more credible than pretending she remembered every detail.
When the affidavit was complete, Isabella added the sentence she feared most: she had signed without reading the full document and had failed to pursue correction promptly after discovering it was being used to harm another family.
She would not allow Adrian's deception to erase her own imperfect decisions, because accountability could not be divided into innocent heroines and faceless villains without destroying the people left between them.
The document examiner's final report arrived with an unexpected appendix identifying the origin of the scanned signature image, traced through embedded file metadata to an office copier leased to Malcolm Price's former law firm.
The timing corresponded to the week Isabella demanded her laptop back, and the discovery placed Malcolm's office in the chain of document handling even though it still did not establish that Malcolm personally carried out the alteration.
Priya notified the proper authorities and avoided a premature public accusation, but before dawn Malcolm's office contacted her, asking whether she would agree to a confidential conversation about potential cooperation.
The message said he possessed original settlement papers and could identify who gave the instructions, provided his own attorney was present and the discussion occurred through investigators.
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Isabella read the note with a tightness in her chest, then told Gabriel she would not trade the truth about her father for any private promise of peace.
For the first time since the hotel incident, Gabriel did not suggest shielding her from the next step; he only asked whether she wanted him beside her when the account finally reached its source.
