"How was Branch Twelve?" she asked.
"Worse than the reports," Nathan answered. "Much worse."
He explained the visit from the moment Bradley ordered him out of the line to the moment Grace laid down her name badge. He repeated the manager's claim that add-on services were mandatory, the threat to deny account approval, and the way the manager had treated Whitfield differently. He told Miriam about Doris, Tyrone, and the copies of complaint acknowledgments they had kept. Miriam wrote steadily, interrupting only to establish times and determine which records existed outside Nathan's memory.
"Do you have the signed application?" she asked.
"No. I refused to sign it. Grace gave me the disclosure materials, and I kept them."
"Good. That limits the immediate customer loss in your case, but it doesn't limit what we need to examine. We'll have to separate what you personally saw from what others reported and from what the records can prove."
Nathan nodded. That was why he trusted Miriam. She had once delayed the opening of a new branch because a vendor's security certification did not match the system actually being installed. The delay had cost the bank money and earned her a week of unpleasant phone calls, but no customer information had been compromised. She was more interested in a record that could withstand scrutiny than in a conclusion that would please him.
"Pull every complaint tied to Branch Twelve for two years," Nathan said. "Fee reversals, product enrollments, employee overrides, edits from regional credentials. Preserve the underlying records before anyone knows we're looking."
Miriam opened a fresh page. "I can direct preservation and analysis under the authority of the audit committee. I also want counsel involved tonight and a written incident hold. We should not rely on your access to the customer side, because your encounter makes you a witness."
"Agreed," Nathan said. "You lead the evidence review. I won't touch anyone's individual account."
Within an hour, bank counsel Lena Ortiz had joined them, along with Marcus Bell, a systems specialist from the information security team. Marcus was quiet and exacting, a man who described software permissions with the patience of someone explaining a dangerous machine. He did not promise that he could recover everything. Instead, he distinguished between records removed from an employee's ordinary view and records actually destroyed from the institution's underlying systems.
"Customer service queues can be closed, archived, or hidden from certain roles," he explained. "The platform also retains transaction journals and audit events. Whether those journals were configured correctly is something we need to verify, not assume."
Miriam asked him to start with the complaint identifiers Nathan had obtained from Doris and Tyrone. Marcus compared them against the active service queue, then against the protected retention archive. He found Doris's complaint history, including the initial submission and an update entered from a regional credential. The customer-facing record had been marked resolved, although the file contained no explanation of the customer's allegation and no confirmation that anyone had contacted her.
"That's not proof the fee was unauthorized," Lena said, studying the screen. "But it is proof the complaint did not receive the review our policy requires. What about the second one?"