Chương 5
Clare stepped closer. “You told me you wanted evidence about your sister’s death. You did not tell me you were copying an entire patient archive.”
“I copied what you brought.”
“You created the environment where I thought I had no choice.”
“That is a creative version of consent.”
“You would recognize one.”
His gaze sharpened, but his voice stayed low. “Be careful.”
“Why? You’ll protect me?”
A nurse passed between them pushing an empty wheelchair. Dominic waited until she was gone.
“My sister called me three times the night she died,” he said.
Clare had heard pieces of the story, never the whole shape.
“Lucia was in a Vale Meridian urgent-care facility outside Newark. She had chest pain. They transferred her late because the overnight transport contract had been cut. One ambulance covered three sites. When she called, I was in a restaurant arguing over linen invoices with a man who had never washed a napkin in his life.”
His mouth twitched without humor.
“I told her I would call back.”
Clare said nothing.
“She left a voicemail. Not dramatic. She said the vending machine had taken her dollar. Then she asked me to bring her charger.”
He looked down at the coffee.
“By the time I listened, she had been intubated.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t tell you for sympathy.”
“Then why tell me now?”
“Because you think I woke up and selected you as a tool. I spent four years paying people to find out who reduced that contract, who approved it, who moved the savings, who buried the complaint. Most took my money and brought me rumors. A few brought records that could never survive a courtroom. One disappeared with fifty thousand dollars and sent me a postcard from Belize.”
“That last part isn’t helping.”
“I know.”
He discarded the coffee without tasting it.
“When you called me after Ethan threw you out, you already had the document. You already believed the signature had been copied. I gave you a place to compare the files.”
“You gave me a forensic technician who works out of a locked room under a restaurant.”
“He has a doctorate from Rutgers.”
“He also had a gun on the desk.”
“He was cleaning it.”
“That is not better.”
Dominic breathed through his nose.
For an instant, he looked almost ordinary: a tired man in an expensive suit who had been awake too long and had not learned how to ask anyone to trust him.
“My attorney has the copied data in an encrypted system,” he said. “No one has opened patient files unrelated to the investigation.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“No. I expect you to decide whether the alternative is safer.”
“What alternative?”
“You give the only drive back to Ethan because you’re afraid of becoming the kind of person he says you are.”
The accuracy of it felt like an intrusion.
Clare folded her arms. “Madison has another file.”
Dominic became still again.
“Where?”
“In her ring.”
He looked toward the exit.
Clare blocked him.
“You are not going after her.”
“I was going to ask where she is.”
“With what, a polite kidnapping?”
“I don’t kidnap people politely.”
She stared at him.
A faint line appeared beside his mouth.
“You make jokes at terrible times,” she said.
“My mother says it is why God kept me unmarried.”
“You’re unmarried because women can sense locked basements.”
“That too.”
The humor vanished as quickly as it had come.
“Madison left the ballroom through the service corridor,” he said. “Her driver never arrived. Ethan’s security chief did.”
Clare’s throat tightened. “How do you know?”
“I had someone outside.”
“Of course you did.”
“She entered the chief’s vehicle willingly.”
“Willingly according to your person.”
“Yes.”
“That means nothing.”
“It means she wasn’t dragged.”
“It doesn’t mean she was safe.”
Dominic glanced toward the waiting-room doors. “Eleanor?”
“Stable. She says Madison knows. She says Ethan made her sign twice for home care on a tablet.”
“And the ring?”
“She indicated there’s something inside it.”
“Then Madison created the hidden file.”
“Or Ethan did.”
“He wouldn’t put evidence on his fiancée.”
“He might put access there if he trusted nobody else.”
Dominic considered that.
His phone vibrated. He looked at the screen, then at Clare.
“What?”
“Your ballroom performance has reached the internet.”
Her stomach dropped.
He handed her the phone.
The video began with the metallic crash.
Someone had filmed from the staircase, close enough to capture Clare’s accusation, Ethan’s demand, Dominic’s line about the witness, and Madison’s whisper. It ended before Eleanor’s medical distress.
The caption read:
JEALOUS EX AND MOB BOSS CRASH VALE ENGAGEMENT GALA.
The account that posted it had more than two million followers.
Comments multiplied beneath the clip.
Some praised Clare. Some called her unstable. Others analyzed her dress, her body, the way she held the microphone. A person who claimed to be a former Vale employee wrote that Ethan had fired nurses for less. Another account posted a photograph of Dominic leaving federal court nine years earlier.
Within minutes, the story had acquired an affair, a stolen inheritance, a secret marriage, and a theory that Eleanor was already dead.
Clare returned the phone.
“I need to speak with hospital counsel.”
“You need to sleep.”
“I need to surrender the drive before Ethan convinces everyone I altered it.”
Dominic studied her. “Once you surrender it, you surrender control.”
“I shouldn’t have control.”
“That has never stopped the people who hurt you.”
“No. It stops me from becoming one of them.”
She went to the nurses’ station and asked for Dr. Reyes.
At three twelve in the morning, Clare placed the black drive in a clear hospital evidence bag while a lawyer named Samuel Pike documented the date, time, device description, and names of everyone present.
Pike represented the hospital, not her. He said so twice.
Clare told him she understood.
May you like
He asked how she had obtained the files. She answered.
He asked whether anyone else had copied them. She told him Dominic had.
