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Ethan slowly pulled the worn backpack from his shoulders.
For some reason, I felt a knot forming in my stomach.
He unzipped it and reached inside.
Then he pulled out a faded blue lanyard with an identification badge attached to it.
The moment I saw the name on that badge, I stopped breathing.
Dr. Clara Hayes.
I knew that name.
Clara had been my Chief Medical Researcher, but she had also been one of my closest friends for more than a decade.
Three weeks earlier, she had died suddenly at home.
The doctors had called it an accidental heart attack.
I had believed them.
Until that morning.
“Where did you get this?” I asked Ethan.
His eyes filled with tears.
“She was my mom.”
I couldn’t speak.
Ethan reached back into the backpack and pulled out something else—a thick, leather-bound journal with handwritten notes sticking out from its pages.
My hands felt strangely cold as I took it from him.
“Your mother told you to bring this to me?”
Ethan nodded.
“She said if anything ever happened to her, I had to bring this book directly to you.”
“Why me?”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“She said I couldn’t trust anyone else in the building.”
Those words hit me harder than I expected.
I opened the journal.
Page after page was filled with Clara’s handwriting.
She had been documenting something.
Unauthorized data breaches.
Forged safety certificates.
Suspicious money transfers.
Someone had been stealing from Harrison Enterprises—and Clara had been quietly gathering evidence.
Then I reached the final page.
The date was the night before she died.
I read the first line.
Then the second.
My hands began to shake.
Clara had written that she had confronted the person responsible.
And then she had written a name.
Arthur Sterling.
My Chief Operating Officer.
The man whose office was directly across from mine.
The man I had trusted for years.
The man who had been standing only a few steps away from me that morning.
I slowly closed the journal.
Then I looked toward the glass doors.
And that’s when I saw Arthur standing outside.
He was arguing with security, demanding to know why the floor had been locked down.
But suddenly, his eyes moved past the guards.
They landed on the evidence bag sitting on my desk.
The untouched coffee.
His expression changed for just a second.
And in that tiny moment, I realized something terrifying.
Arthur knew the coffee had failed.
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