Page 148 of Sugar & Shadows

“Bingo. It’s all stashed in holding companies, investment portfolios, and the six fund products Blackbriar manages, but it’s there.”

“What does this have to do with Will?” I asked.

“A compressed archive file,” she answered. “One titled project Evergreen Data.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose.

“The file was compressed by user W.Mcmanus two weeks before his death and the subsequent wipe of the system.”

My stomach dropped.

“He sent it?”

“No idea. He could have just downloaded it or saved it. But it was a massive file, so it wasn’t something that would be quick or easy to transfer.”

“Can you recover it?” My hands were shaking. This could be it. This could break all of this open.

“No.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding. Fuck.

“It was displaced.”

Elbow on the table, I rested my head in my hand. “What does that mean?”

“He saved it locally, and then the servers were scrubbed.”

“In English.”

“Physical storage.”

I sat up, heart thudding. “It exists.”

“Potentially. Or it did at one point.” Another crash in the distance.

“Put that glitter away right now,” Meg shouted.

The tiny responding giggles told me a glitter bomb was imminent.

“Something was happening,” she said softly.

I closed my eyes, thinking about Will. The details Nina had shared. He was young, nervous, and trying to build a career and move up in the world after a tough start in it. Probably in over his head but smart enough to know something was off.

“He knew,” I whispered.

“A lot more than we originally thought,” Meg agreed. “And I don’t think this was just financial fraud. The Manitoba data was there. The reports, the lawsuits, the settlement information. Something else called ‘yield degradation modeling.’”

My heart pounded more heavily.

“I’m still trying to figure out where it could be. I’ve already accessed Will’s Gmail account, and the police department has his phone.”

I stared out the window at the snow-covered landscape and exhaled.

“I gotta run,” I said. Nina and Frankie wanted answers. Mind racing to connect all these new data points, I snagged my coat and headed out. “Call me if you find anything else.”

As I trudged through the snow, I couldn’t stop thinking about how, somewhere out there, a physical copy of that data may exist.

The bell over the salon door chimed softly as I stepped inside. The place smelled like vanilla and acetone, and Dua Lipa blared from the speakers. But it was empty save for the Dunne sisters.