Vanessa whispered from the doorway.
“Daniel, stop talking.”
But his pride had already taken over.
He looked at me.
“You don’t understand business. If this becomes public, thousands of jobs could be affected.”
I almost smiled.
Daniel had forgotten something important about me.
Before we married, I spent three years working as a forensic contract analyst.
And while Daniel had been quietly investigating my mother—
I had started investigating him too.
“I understand contracts perfectly,” I said.
Then I reached into my purse.
And removed a flash drive.
“And I brought copies.”
Daniel stared at the flash drive.
“What copies?”
I placed it on the table.
“Everything you assumed I wouldn’t notice.”
His eyes moved toward the door.
Richard folded his arms.
“Continue, Claire.”
Two months earlier, Daniel had left his personal laptop open while he was taking a shower.
I hadn’t gone looking through his files.
I didn’t need to.
An email notification appeared on the screen.
WARD CLAIM — CONTAINMENT STRATEGY.
My mother’s name was directly underneath it.
After that, I stopped believing in coincidence.
Daniel regularly backed up documents from his devices onto our shared home server.
I had legal access to that server.
So I checked.
I found emails.
Meeting notes.
Draft recommendations.
Internal documents.
Then I found one message that changed everything.
It was from Daniel to Vanessa.
He had written that if Richard Halston ever connected me to Eleanor Ward, Daniel’s promotion would be finished.
He instructed Vanessa to keep me away from senior executives until the acquisition closed.
Vanessa’s response was even worse.
She suggested making me look insignificant enough that no important executive would bother asking who I was.
Daniel suddenly lunged toward the flash drive.
Security stepped between us.
His face twisted.
