Chapter 4 - What Daniel Needed Alive
Daniel approached my hospital bed with the syringe held low beside his leg.
Henry tried to stand, but pain forced him back against the pillows.
“You cannot leave witnesses,” Henry said.
Daniel barely looked at him.
“You were supposed to suffocate before the firefighters found you.”
My contraction began before Daniel reached me.
I gripped the bedrail and forced myself to breathe slowly.
He smiled.
“This is almost over, Claire.”
“What is in the syringe?”
“Something that will make your collapse look natural.”
“And the baby?”
“The doctors will save her.”
Her.
Daniel knew we were having a daughter even though I had refused to learn the sex.
He had accessed my private medical records.
“You need her alive for the trust.”
“I need a legal heir.”
“You do not care about your own child.”
“I care about what she controls.”
Henry threw a metal cup across the room. It struck the window and drew attention from the hallway.
Daniel turned.
I seized the IV pole and drove it into his injured hand.
The syringe fell.
Daniel grabbed my hair, but the door burst open before he could pull me from the bed.
A hospital security officer tackled him.
Two nurses rushed to me as the baby’s heartbeat dropped sharply.
The last thing I saw before they wheeled me toward surgery was Daniel pinned against the floor, still smiling.
He knew something I did not.
My daughter was delivered twelve minutes later.
She was small, furious, and alive.
I named her Eleanor after my mother.
When they placed her against my chest, I felt every lie Daniel had built around me begin to collapse.
But the peace lasted less than an hour.
Detective Lena Brooks entered my recovery room with Henry.
“Daniel escaped custody during the power failure,” she said.
I looked toward the glass nursery wall.
“Where is my daughter?”
A nurse wheeled Eleanor into the room.
I held her so tightly she began to fuss.
Detective Brooks placed a plastic evidence bag on the table. Inside was the syringe Daniel had carried.
“The laboratory identified the drug,” she said. “It would not have killed you immediately.”
“What would it have done?”
“It causes confusion, memory loss, and symptoms that can resemble severe postpartum psychosis.”
Daniel had never planned to leave my body in the snow.
He had planned to leave me alive and unable to defend myself.
Henry opened his briefcase.
“There is another problem. The original trust is missing from the basement archive.”
“Daniel took it?”
“Possibly.”
He placed a photograph beside me.
It showed Vanessa leaving the mansion after the alarm. Beneath my robe, she wore a realistic prosthetic pregnancy belly.
“She was never carrying Daniel’s child,” Henry said.
Detective Brooks pointed toward the background of the image.
A silver haired woman stood behind an upstairs window.
I stared at her face.
May you like
It looked exactly like my mother.
Continue to the next part: Security footage suggests Claire’s mother entered the mansion years after Claire buried her.
