Chapter 7 - Someone Had Been Tracking Grant’s Recovery in Secret
The specialist found one more fact inside the sensor.
It had been paired.
Not merely recording internally.
It had transmitted simple movement alerts to another device.
Grant did not ask how.
He asked where.
The answer was incomplete.
The receiver was no longer active.
But the pairing occurred inside the estate seven days earlier.
Derek immediately became the obvious suspect.
Grant still refused to call suspicion proof.
He summoned every person who had legitimate access to the wheelchair.
Two nurses.
A therapist.
The estate driver.
A medical-equipment delivery technician.
Derek.
The first four agreed to interviews.
Derek refused.
That mattered.
Then the delivery technician remembered something.
The chair had arrived with factory seals intact.
Two days later, Derek called the supplier complaining about a “loose side panel.”
No repair request was completed.
Derek said he fixed it himself.
Grant stared at the service record.
The hidden component had been installed around that time.
Still not absolute proof.
Enough to make the pattern narrow.
Grant asked Derek to come to the library.
Derek arrived twenty minutes late.
His cheek still carried faint swelling from Grant’s punch.
“You’ve already decided I did it.”
“No.”
Derek laughed.
“Really?”
“I’ve decided you know something.”
“About a motion sensor?”
“About my foot moving.”
Derek’s expression shifted.
Tiny.
Grant saw.
“You knew.”
“No.”
“You told Dr. Moore I had spasms.”
“I assumed.”
“You canceled therapy after the first movement.”
“You were exhausted.”
“You told me the therapist was sick.”
Derek looked away.
Grant leaned forward in the wheelchair.
“Why?”
Derek’s voice sharpened.
“Because you were becoming obsessed with every twitch.”
“I didn’t know about the twitch.”
Silence.
That was the mistake.
Grant had never been told about the first one.
Yet Derek just described Grant becoming obsessed with it.
Derek realized too late.
Grant’s voice dropped.
“How many times did my foot move before the party?”
Derek said nothing.
Grant continued.
“How many times did you see it?”
No answer.
Then Derek whispered:
“You don’t understand what would have happened.”
Grant stared.
“If I moved?”
Derek looked toward the library door.
His confidence was gone again.
“Not if you moved.”
A pause.
“If you remembered.”
Grant felt the room change.
There.
The wheelchair.
The canceled therapy.
The hidden sensor.
None of it was about keeping Grant helpless forever.
Derek was waiting for something.
Watching Grant’s recovery like a countdown.
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Because the more Grant’s body returned—
the closer Derek believed his memory might come back with it.
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