Chapter 168 The Names on the Letterhead

Chapter 168 The Names on the Letterhead
I didn’t sleep after that call.

I sat on the edge of the bed until the sky outside the dorm window turned from black to a thin, dirty gray. Then I opened my laptop and started digging the way I had promised myself I would.

At first, it was only the public-facing pages.

The kind of pages designed to make an organization look harmless. Polished photographs, carefully chosen words, smiling faces, and enough soft colors to convince anyone that they were looking at a charity rather than an institution with something to hide.

The Purity Fund's website was still exactly the same. Its language remained painfully sweet—“empowering young women of faith,” “protecting purity and potential,” “a family of supporters guiding the next generation.” Every sentence sounded rehearsed, designed to make donors feel as though they were contributing to something noble.

I scrolled through the scholarship section.

There were photographs of past recipients standing beside their parents, holding certificates, smiling beneath enormous banners bearing the Fund's logo. Some had handwritten testimonials beneath their pictures, thanking the organization for changing their lives. Others talked about opportunities, education, faith, family, and futures that supposedly wouldn't have been possible without the Fund.

Everything looked perfect... rather, too perfect.

Then I searched for Sophia, but I got nothing. Her name didn't appear anywhere. I tried the scholarship recipients' page again, thinking I'd simply missed it. I scrolled slowly this time, reading every name, checking every photograph.

She was gone.

Not moved. Not buried somewhere beneath an updated list. Gone.

I opened an archived version of the website and searched again. And there she was.

Three weeks earlier, Sophia's photograph had been right there among the other scholarship recipients. Her name had been listed beneath it, along with the year she'd received the scholarship and a short paragraph praising her academic achievements.

I stared at the screen.

Then I refreshed the current page.

Nothing. Then i went back to the archive. It was there.

Back to the current site. Gone.

My stomach tightened.

Someone had removed her.

And they hadn't simply taken down her photograph. They had erased every trace of her association with the Fund, as though someone had gone through the website with a digital eraser and carefully scrubbed her existence from it.

I searched her name through the site's search bar. No results. I tried different spellings, yet I got nothing. I even searched the scholarship announcement itself.

Deleted.

The announcement from the year she received the scholarship was gone too.

I sat back in my chair, staring at the screen. That wasn't normal.

Organizations updated websites all the time. Pages disappeared. Old photographs were replaced. Scholarship lists were archived. But this wasn't an update.

This was deliberate. Someone had wanted Sophia removed.

And judging by how completely they'd done it, someone had wanted to make sure nobody would notice she'd ever been there in the first place.

I opened another archived snapshot and looked at her photograph again. Sophia was smiling. Unaware. Young. Trusting.

I stared at that smile for a long moment before a thought settled heavily in my mind.

If they had gone to this much trouble to erase her from a website, what else had they erased?

But i knew one thing—I needed to continue digging.

I started with the board list.

At first, there was nothing particularly shocking about it. Most of the names were familiar in the vague, distant way powerful men in our community were familiar.

People I had seen at church functions, charity dinners, fundraising galas, and photographs in the local paper. Men my father shook hands with while cameras flashed. Men who donated enough money to have buildings named after them and scholarships established in their honor.

I scrolled slowly, barely paying attention. Then I saw it. My finger stopped on the screen.

I blinked. Once. Twice.

NO.

My eyes had to be playing tricks on me. I scrolled back up. There it was again.

Richard Ashford.

My father's name!

I stopped breathing.

Beneath it, in smaller text: 'Board Member, Scholarship Oversight Committee.'

For several seconds, I just stared.

My first instinct was to laugh. Not because it was funny, but because my brain refused to process what I was looking at. My father's name was on the Purity Fund's website. That alone wasn't exactly a revelation.

I'd known he donated to the organization. Everyone knew. He'd attended their dinners. He'd given speeches. He'd stood on stages talking about faith, responsibility, young women, and the importance of giving children "the right opportunities."

But Board Member?

I read it again. Then again. My pulse began to climb. I scrolled upward, desperate to find some explanation that would make the words mean something less significant.

Instead, I found another name— One that made the blood drain from my face.

Harrington Ashford.

My uncle. My father's older brother.

His title sat beneath his name in the smaller section labeled Executive Leadership: 'Senior Advisor, Strategic Direction.'

I stared at the screen. My mouth went dry. "No." The word left my lips before I even realized I'd spoken.

I leaned closer to the laptop as if getting closer would somehow change what I was seeing. It didn't.

My father. My uncle.

Both of them.

Not donors, not distant supporters, not wealthy men who occasionally wrote checks and smiled for photographs.

They were inside. Deep inside.

My eyes moved back to my father's name. 'Scholarship Oversight Committee.' The words suddenly looked different. They weren't just words anymore. They were a door... and I'd just opened it.

I thought about Sophia. Her scholarship. Her sudden removal. The email she'd received. The thirty-day deadline. The polite language. The careful wording that made everything sound administrative and harmless.

My stomach turned.

I sat back slowly, my mind racing to put together pieces I hadn't even realized were pieces.

I had always known my family was involved with the Fund in the casual way people like us were involved with organizations like that. Donations. Charity galas. Fundraising dinners. Public speeches about values and faith and helping the next generation.

That was what I'd believed. That was what I'd been allowed to believe.

But this? This was different.

My father hadn't simply supported the machine. He was sitting inside the room where the machine made decisions. And my uncle wasn't standing somewhere outside it either. He was part of its executive leadership.

I looked at the screen again, as a cold sensation crept slowly through my body.

If my father sat on the committee responsible for scholarship oversight, then there was a chance he knew about Sophia's case.

No.

Not a chance.

He would have had access to it. He could have known. My breathing became shallow.

I thought about all the times my father had spoken about Sophia without actually saying her name. The careful pauses. The strange changes in his expression whenever Marta's name came up. The way certain conversations always seemed to end when I entered the room.

I had spent years believing Sophia was the reason my family had fallen apart.

Now, for the first time, I wondered whether my family had been involved in destroying hers.

My eyes dropped to the screen again. Richard Ashford, 'Board Member.' Something hot and sick rolled through my stomach.

I pushed my chair back so quickly it scraped against the floor.

I couldn't breathe properly.

This wasn't a coincidence.

It couldn't be.

Someone had removed Sophia from the Fund's records. Someone had cut off her scholarship, her housing, her future, with a polite email and a thirty-day deadline.

And my father had been sitting on the committee responsible for overseeing those scholarships.

I stared at his name until the letters blurred.

For the first time in my life, I wasn't looking at Richard Ashford and seeing my father.

I was looking at him and wondering what else he had done that I'd never known about.