Sign the Papers Mr. Langford novel Chapter 441

When Jude returned to Langford Medical, the rain was still pouring.

The glass exterior of the building gleamed under the downpour, the reflections of the streetlights fracturing across the wet pavement. The receptionist hesitated when he walked in, but offered a quiet, "Mr. Sinclair."

He nodded curtly and went straight upstairs.

The mirrored walls of the elevator reflected his face.

Pale, exhausted, his eyes traced with crimson veins.

He rarely looked this defeated. Everyone in Langford's project department knew Jude as a pillar of reliability and emotional stability. Even when Lawrence aggressively rejected his proposals to his face, he calmly went back and fixed them. Even when Willow came to him in tears, he could soothe her while simultaneously patching up whatever disaster she'd caused.

Now he finally realized that his so-called 'stability' was nothing but a constant cycle of cleaning up someone else's messes.

And when you clean up enough messes, the foundations rot entirely.

The tech team was still working overtime.

When Jude pushed open the door, Zachary Reynolds, the head of the department, was glued to the server logs, surrounded by a bank of glowing monitors.

"Mr. Sinclair." Zach stood up. "The full audio was sent to Thorne Corp. We're continuing to trace the access paths."

"Audit my account," Jude ordered.

Zach blinked in surprise.

"Yours?"

"Every single login record for the past three months. Especially regarding the Family Companion complaint attachments, archived project searches, conference audio downloads, and permission alterations on the shared drive."

Zach hesitated. "Mr. Sinclair, you have high-level admin clearance. The logs will be massive."

"Then go through them line by line."

Reading the absolute finality in his expression, Zach didn't dare question him further and immediately started pulling the data.

Half an hour later, the first batch of records was ready.

Most of them were completely routine.

Logins from Jude's office computer, on the Langford intranet, using a static IP. The timestamps and actions all perfectly aligned.

Until a late-night login record popped up.

The date was the early hours of the morning following Logan's second complaint.

Logged-in Account: Jude Sinclair.

Device: Project Department Public Terminal.

Content Accessed: Family Companion Project Grievance Attachment Directory.

Action: Permission Alteration.

Zach's face dropped.

"You weren't in the office at this time."

Staring at the log, Jude asked quietly, "Where was I?"

"You flew out to Savannah for a business trip that night. The travel itinerary is right here in the system."

The deeper Zach dug, the worse his expression became.

That very same night, Jude's account had granted the PR team's public account temporary preview access to the grievance attachments.

Permission duration: Seven days.

After seven days, the access automatically expired.

If they hadn't been actively hunting for it now, no one would have ever noticed.

Jude stared at the screen, an unbearable weight crushing his chest.

"Who was on the public terminal?"

Zach pulled up the security camera footage request.

A few minutes later, the video feed buffered onto the screen.

At 1:23 AM, the project department was dimly lit. A figure in a light-colored jacket walked into the bullpen and sat down at the terminal. The camera angle was terrible, capturing only a partial silhouette and the back of their head.

The face was completely obscured.

But Jude recognized that jacket.

Willow had worn it.

She had told him that day that she was exhausted and wanted to rest in the project department for a while. He had handed over his spare access card, telling her that if she needed any files, she should use the public terminal and wait for him to officially authorize them when he returned.

He had never explicitly given her his password.