"There’s probably footage that will prove my father had nothing to do with this, and I have no way to get it"

It was comforting to know that when push came to shove, Chayala’s friends had her back. She rubbed her tired eyes and looked across the conference table littered with pizza boxes and empty cans of grapefruit sparkling water, and gave Dassi and Aly a weary smile.

After Dassi’s vort on Thursday night, they’d watched footage until late at night and had jumped back into it — Dassi included — on Motzaei Shabbos and all day Sunday. The batch of footage that her security company had sent her was almost entirely made up of footage after Chayala’s father’s investigation was already underway, but right at the beginning there had been two weeks of footage teeming with promise. There was material that captured her father alone, with Mike, and two instances of Mike alone. Chayala shuddered to think what Mike might have had access to while he was alone in her offices, so her IT company was doing a deep dive to triple check that nothing had been compromised.

Through it all, Dassi and Aly (and Etty, when she had five minutes to run over between bedtimes) were right there, combing through footage with her and helping decipher any hard-to-hear sections, which were more than she thought.

“You there?” came a voice through the phone, and Chayala startled. She recovered quickly.

“I’m here.”

It was the guy from her security company.

“Okay, so I took your request up the food chain to see if there’s any way that I could get a master code to override the 90-day maximum that we currently have on your account. I thought we had the footage stored on a server somewhere, and I just had to figure out a way to access it….” He got quiet. “I’m really sorry. Unfortunately, I was wrong, and we don’t have it any more. My boss told me that our system automatically deletes the archives over 90 days old — otherwise the data files would be so big that nothing would work at all. I wish there was something more I could do.”

Chayala slumped in her chair. She was sitting with her feet up on another chair, so that was impressive.

“Thanks for trying. If there’s anything else you can think of, I’m all ears.”

“Well, listen, it is Sunday. I’ll see if anyone on the team has any ideas tomorrow, and I’ll keep you posted.”

Chayala hung up the phone, feeling deflated. This was the closest she’d gotten by far, and once again it looked like her big plans were about to fall through.

“Hey! Don’t give up now,” said Aly. She got up to sweep a pile of crumpled brown paper bags into the garbage can. “We have that one video that definitely shows something fishy! It’s a great start.”

“Ugh, I’ve watched that video so many times that at this point I’m not even sure if it’s fishy or just normal business stuff,” moaned Chayala.

Dassi turned her laptop around and loaded the clip that had gotten Chayala so worked up when she’d come across it on Thursday night. She pressed play. On the screen, her father and his partner stood in the conference room, the volume of their voices wavering with the low-quality audio footage, but the words were still audible.