Page 22 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

Has she found what I’ve missed already?

The questions don’t stop when I close my office door.

They don’t fade into the background or dull with distance from the conversation. If anything, they keen. Narrowing, growing more precise, more insistent.

Because once a pattern appears, it demands resolution. And resolution, if it’s going to mean anything, requires verification. Data.

I move to my desk without hesitation and sit, waking the system with a familiarity that borders on automatic.

The screen flickers to life, and before it fully loads, my fingers are already moving, pulling up access logs, user credentials, file histories. Everything that sits beneath the surface of the system Annie has only just begun to understand.

The visible structure is only ever part of it. The rest is what keeps it intact.

And I don’t trust anything I haven’t checked myself.

The data populates in layers, clean and ordered, exactly as it should be. I begin with the same timeframe Annie isolated, narrowing the window to match the invoices she flagged, then refining further.

File types, vendor tags, access frequency. The process is methodical, each step reducing noise, stripping away what isn’t relevant until only the necessary remains.

At first, everything aligns.

It usually does.

If something is wrong, it won’t be obvious. It won’t present itself as a mistake or an error or anything careless enough to be caught on a surface pass.

It’ll be embedded, structured to survive scrutiny, which means I have to go further than most people would think to look.

So I do.

I isolate the specific vendor files she flagged and run a deeper query, cross referencing access patterns across time rather than entries. It takes a few seconds longer than usual, which is enough to make me pause, because it isn’t immediate.

Then…

There.

A timestamp.

Unremarkable in isolation.

02:13 a.m.

I don’t move right away. I scroll back, then forward again, confirming the entry rather than reacting to it. The file’s correct. The path is correct. The access record is clean.

Too clean.

I pull the associated credentials.

Annie Wright.

That’s where it stops aligning.

She doesn’t have full access clearance yet. Not without secondary authentication, not without a corresponding system acknowledgment that validates the entry.

I pull the authentication logs next, refining the query to match the exact timestamp.

Nothing. No login record. No authentication sequence.

No system recognition that access was granted at all.