Chapter 22 Chapter Twenty Two

• The education fund’s public disbursement record listed the transaction under a corporate allocation code that traced back to a Blackwood Holdings subsidiary.
• Sylvia found it at 11:40 p.m. after three hours of cross-referencing payment references against publicly available grant databases. The surplus amount matched. The timing matched. The method matched everything Victoria had described. No personal name appeared, but the originating account left little room for coincidence.
• She closed the laptop and sat in the dark of her room without moving. The two hundred dollars she had prepared to send had never been needed. Someone else had closed the gap first, efficiently and without permission. The someone was no longer in question.