Chapter 1 - THE SEALED FOLDER
Marcus Reed grabbed my arm hard enough to drag the IV tubing across my skin.
“You’re dying. Sign the company over.”
My name is Renee Sterling. Thirty-two years old. Only daughter of Arthur Sterling, founder of Sterling Maritime Systems. The newspapers preferred another description: billionaire heiress.
None of that mattered while Marcus yanked me upright from a hospital bed in Seattle and my body, already wrecked by treatment, screamed at the movement.
Then Daniel Hayes moved.
Daniel was forty-one, gray already touching his hair, a short beard over a face that rarely gave anything away. He was a widowed electrician who looked more natural in a denim jacket and work boots than beside a private oncology suite with a rain-soaked view of downtown.
He crossed the room in two steps, grabbed Marcus by the front of his coat, and slammed him into the wall.
“Touch her again and you answer to me.”
Marcus shoved back and swung.
Daniel blocked the punch and hit him once. Marcus crashed into a chair.
Dr. Elena Vance appeared in the doorway just as security alarms started sounding.
Marcus wiped blood from his mouth and laughed.
“You idiot. Ask her why she called MY number that night.” Daniel froze.
That was worse than the punch.
He slowly turned toward me.
“What is he talking about?”
I gripped the bedsheet.
I had called Marcus.
That part was true.
Three months earlier, on the night Daniel found me unconscious beside a stalled car near the waterfront, my phone record showed one outgoing call before 911. Marcus. Not Daniel.
Not Dr. Vance. Marcus.
Then Marcus grabbed the thick brown legal folder from the bedside table and slammed it down between us.
“She didn’t call you by accident.”
My heart stopped.
The folder was supposed to stay sealed until my attorney arrived.
Daniel reached toward it.
“Daniel... don’t open it.”
He looked at me in a way I had never seen before. Not angry. Hurt.
Then security dragged Marcus toward the hall.
He shouted one last thing before the door closed:
“Ask her why your wife’s name is in there!”
Daniel went completely still.
His wife, Claire Hayes, had died five years earlier in a ferry accident.
I knew that.
Everyone who knew Daniel knew that.
But he did not know I had spent the last six months investigating Claire’s death.
Before I met him.
Before he saved me.
Before he ever knew my name.
The truth was simple enough to destroy whatever had formed between us:
I had not met Daniel by accident.
May you like
I had gone looking for him.
And Marcus knew why.
