The Corner Office
Seven Years of Silence

The Forged Signature

August 25, 2026 · Part 5 of 10 · 2 min

By morning, Junie was safe. Tamsin Voss was found forty minutes later, curled under a collapsed vendor cart with a sprained wrist and a phone full of shaky photos she'd taken seconds before the platform gave way — photos nobody had looked at yet.

Callum hadn't slept. By six a.m. he was back at the barricade tape around Route Nine, badge-less, uninvited, watching a young engineer in a hard hat argue with a security guard about clearance.

"I have authorization from Foster Lang," she was saying.

"I don't have your name on any list."

Callum stepped up. "Priya Chandran?"

She turned, startled. "How do you—"

"Foster mentioned you might be here. I used to work for Anchorpoint."

Recognition crossed her face like a light switching on. "You're him. You're Reece. I read your file three weeks ago."

"There's a file."

"There's a file nobody's supposed to have pulled, and I pulled it anyway, because bracket seven-B's maintenance history didn't match the load reports, and nobody would explain why, and now—" she gestured at the wreckage behind the tape, voice cracking, "—now I know why."

The guard let them both through when Priya flashed a badge Callum didn't recognize — new hire credentials, junior structural.

They walked the perimeter together, Priya narrating what the salvage crew had logged overnight. Twisted gusset plates. A support column sheared clean through at the base, corrosion visible even from thirty feet, dark and flaking like old scar tissue.

"This matches your original photos," Priya said, pulling up images on her tablet. "Almost exactly. Except—"

"Except what?"

She turned the tablet toward him. On the screen was a scanned inspection report, Anchorpoint letterhead, dated six years and ten months ago — three months after Callum's firing.

It carried his employee ID number. His report format. His signature at the bottom.

And a conclusion, in bold, that bracket seven-B was "within acceptable safety parameters, no further action required."

"I never wrote this," Callum said.

"I know," Priya said quietly. "That's the problem."

Continue the story Part 6: The Offer →

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