Chapter 2: The Message on the Screen
Nobody moved.
Then Marcus laughed.
A short, cold sound that didn't belong in that room.
"She's a traumatized child, Claire.
She's hearing what she wants to hear."
I didn't look at him.
I pressed my own hand flat against Mark's chest.
One second.
Two seconds.
Then I felt it.
Faint.
Slow.
But there.
I grabbed my phone and called 911.
Marcus stepped in front of me.
"Put the phone down.
You're going to make a scene over a little girl's imagination?"
"Move away from me, Marcus."
His jaw tightened.
"Claire, I am warning you—"
"I said move."
Teresa appeared in the doorway, her face unreadable.
She looked at Marcus first.
Not at me.
Not at Chloe.
At Marcus.
And something passed between them that turned my st0mach.
The paramedics arrived within minutes.
As they worked, I stepped back — and that's when I saw it.
Marcus had left his phone face-up on the side table.
One message was still lit on the screen.
It was from Dr.
Salgado.
Four words.
*"Is she signing tonight?"*
I screenshot it before the screen went dark.
That message wasn't about Mark's d*ath.
It was about the company transfer documents Marcus had placed in front of me the moment I arrived at the clinic — the ones I had been too devastated to read.
The ones I had almost signed.
---
What Claire found inside those documents — and what Dr.
Salgado was really paid to do — is in the full story.
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The truth is worse than anyone in that room expected.
