Chapter 9 - FRIDAY WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MY FUNERAL
Chloe’s condition made everything feel brutally immediate.
Lucas tried to leave my room to get to her, apologize for leaving me short-handed, and somehow remain composed all at once.
“Go,” I told him. “Now.”
“But—”
“Lucas.”
He stopped.
Daniel rose from the chair. “I’ll send a car.”
Lucas’s face crumpled before he got it back under control. “Thank you.”
Once he was gone, I told Daniel to activate Chloe’s trust immediately, no delays, no press, no ceremony. He did it from the hallway. Within the hour, the hospital received financial confirmation that her surgical expenses would be fully covered.
When Lucas called later that night from the pediatric unit, his voice broke the second he tried to thank me.
I cut him off.
“Just stay with your sister.”
By then, my own condition had improved enough for me to be moved out of intensive cardiac care into a secured private suite. Dr. Shah said the antidote and medication changes were stabilizing me. I wasn’t safe yet. My heart had taken real damage. But I was no longer dying on someone else’s schedule.
Nora returned just before midnight with an update.
Raymond’s apartment in the Gold Coast had been tossed in a hurry. Two laptops were missing. A safe had been emptied. But a housekeeper found one thing in the garbage chute room downstairs: torn pieces of a printed itinerary to O’Hare and a hotel confirmation in Vancouver under a fake variation of his middle name.
“He’s running,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Can he get out?”
“Not if we’re lucky.”
Luck, however, is a thin business partner.
At 3:40 a.m., Nora called Daniel from the airport command desk.
Raymond had not boarded any international flight.
Instead, one of his burner phones pinged near an industrial strip on the Indiana border.
By sunrise, police had raided a small leased warehouse there.
They found no Raymond.
But they found accounting files, a shredder still warm, and two black duffel bags packed with cash, passports, and copies of my company’s emergency succession documents.
Among those papers was the clearest piece of evidence yet:
a draft memo prepared by Raymond for posthumous release, expressing “deep sorrow” over my death and support for Victoria as grieving widow while quietly recommending the board elevate him for “stability.”
Prepared before I was dead.
Daniel stood at the window reading the copy Nora sent over.
“He was already practicing your obituary.”
I lay back against the pillows and let the rage pass through me.
Friday had been the day I was meant to be buried in silence.
May you like
Instead, my wife was in custody, my cardiologist was under arrest, my CFO was on the run, and a little girl across the hospital was finally being prepped for the surgery that might save her life.
For the first time in days, I allowed myself to believe I might outlive the people who had planned my ending.
