Chapter 3 - The Missing Watch
The silence in the room was absolute. Only the steady, rhythmic thumping of the fetal monitor broke the tension.
Daniel swallowed hard, his eyes glued to the contract in Thomas’s hand. He tried to recover, plastering a mask of confused innocence over his panic.
“I don’t know what you’re holding, Thomas,” Daniel said, his voice dropping into the soothing, reasonable tone he used on nervous clients. He turned to Claire. “Honey, what is going on? Why did the hospital call me and say you fell? Were you dizzy?”
He was gaslighting her. While she lay in a hospital bed, monitoring their unborn child’s heartbeat, he was trying to make her feel crazy.
“I wasn’t dizzy, Daniel,” Claire said, her voice shaking with a rage she had never felt before. “Madeline Shaw grabbed me.”
Daniel flinched. The name hung in the air like poison. “Madeline? What… why would Madeline be here?”
“She said you sent her,” Claire replied, watching his face closely. “To get my signature.”
“She’s lying!” Daniel stepped closer, gripping the footboard of the bed. “Claire, you have to believe me. Madeline has been acting erratic for weeks. I fired her yesterday. She’s obsessed. If she came here, she did it on her own to hurt you. I would never try to trick you.”
It was a good performance. A year ago, Claire might have believed him.
But then she noticed his left wrist.
When Daniel gripped the footboard, his cuff slid up. His wrist was bare.
“Where is your watch, Daniel?” Claire asked softly.
Daniel blinked, thrown off by the sudden shift. “What? My watch?”
“The vintage Patek Philippe I gave you for our first anniversary. You never take it off. You say it’s your lucky charm for big meetings.”
“I… I must have left it on my dresser. I rushed out of the office so fast—”
“Madeline was wearing it,” Claire said, her voice turning to ice.
Daniel froze.
“She had it on a long gold chain around her neck, tucked into her coat,” Claire continued, the image flashing brilliantly in her mind. “When she reached into her purse, it slipped out. It’s custom engraved with your initials. You didn’t fire her, Daniel. You gave her your lucky watch before she came to ruin me.”
Daniel’s mouth opened, but no words came out. The sophisticated, smooth-talking CEO was drowning, and the water was rising fast.
Before he could invent another lie, Thomas’s phone buzzed. It was a secure text from Vance.
Thomas read the screen. His eyes narrowed, turning as cold as slate.
“It seems your ‘erratic’ former employee is quite the bookkeeper, Daniel,” Thomas said, pocketing his phone. “My team just cracked the first layer of the flash drive she dropped. Would you like to explain why Bennett Strategies has been wiring three million dollars a month to an offshore shell company in the Cayman Islands?”
Daniel took a step backward, his face turning an ashen gray. “That… that’s standard tax deferment strategy. Claire, tell him he has no right to look at my proprietary company data.”
“Oh, I have every right,” Thomas said, taking a slow, deliberate step toward his son-in-law. “Because according to the metadata on those wire transfers, the shell company doesn’t belong to Bennett Strategies.”
Thomas stopped inches from Daniel.
“It belongs to an entity named the Eleanor Whitmore Memorial Foundation. A foundation registered three months ago. With my deceased wife’s forged signature as the guarantor.”
Claire gasped, the monitors around her stomach spiking in response to her heart rate.
Daniel hadn’t just cheated. He had desecrated her mother’s memory to steal from them.
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“I… I can explain,” Daniel stammered, backing toward the door.
“You won’t have to,” Thomas said, his voice a low, terrifying rumble. “Because you’re not leaving this room until you tell me how a dead woman signed your loan agreements.”
