I set the flash drive on his desk. “From the hospital’s footage of the day.”
He went quiet.
“What did you see?,” he said.
“All of it,” I said.
“You were only thinking about the money.”
For a second, he looked like he might break.
Then his face hardened.
“I was trying to protect you.”
“By lying?” I asked. “By signing away our dautgher’s truth? By hiding money in your name?”
“You were falling apart,” he snapped. “You weren’t thinking clearly at all.”
“And you were only thinking about the money,” I said.
“You couldn’t handle knowing it was someone’s fault.”
He leaned forward, voice low. “If this goes to court, they will drag your therapy records into it. They will call you unstable. And I signed an NDA. The doctor managed to work around the fact that I was the only one signing. He had a lot to lose.”
“So you’d help them,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I said, “Explain the settlement. Start to finish.”
He admitted the error. The check. The confidentiality. The promise not to sue. The decision to keep me in the dark because, in his words, “You couldn’t handle knowing it was someone’s fault.”
She watched the video without blinking.
When he finished, I pulled my phone out, stopped the recording, and set it on the desk.
Daniel stared at it like it could explode.
“You recorded me,” he breathed.
“I did,” I said. “Because you already chose them over me once.”
The next day, I met a malpractice attorney named Renee.
She watched the video without blinking. Then she listened to Daniel’s recording.
