He Didn’t Reach for Me

My husband put his hand against my back when I was standing six feet from the edge.

Then he pushed.

I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant.

For twelve years, I had slept beside Derek Vaughn. I knew the way he cleared his throat before answering a difficult question and the way his left eye narrowed when he was reading numbers.

But I had never seen the expression on his face as my boots slid across the ice.

He looked calm.

“Derek!”

My hand caught the sleeve of his jacket for less than a second.

He pulled away.

Then there was nothing under my feet.

I remember hitting something hard. My shoulder first, then my hip. I rolled until my body slammed against a shelf of rock maybe twenty feet below the trail.

Snow came loose above me.

I covered my stomach with both hands.

The baby moved.

Once.

Then again.

I couldn’t breathe properly, but he was moving.

Above me, I heard Derek.

I almost called out.

Then a woman’s voice stopped me.

“Can you see her?”

Paige Lawson.

Derek’s executive assistant.

I pressed my cheek against the snow.

“No,” Derek said.

“Should we call somebody?”

There was a pause.

Then Derek said something I have replayed more times than I care to admit.

“For fifty million dollars, Paige, she better not have survived that.”

I stopped trying to move.

Paige said something I couldn’t hear.

Derek answered sharply.

“Just do what we discussed.”

Their footsteps disappeared.

I stayed on that ledge with one hand over my son’s body and the other dug into the snow.

Fifty million dollars.

I knew exactly what he meant.

Eight months earlier, Derek had convinced me to increase my life insurance.

He was the CFO of Mercer Architectural Glass, the company my father had founded, and he’d made it sound ordinary.

Estate planning.

Tax exposure.

The baby.

Our family holdings.

I signed where he marked the pages.

Derek always handled the numbers.

I handled buildings.

That had been our arrangement for years.

Lying on that ledge, I finally wondered how many other things I had signed because my husband had put a yellow tab beside my name.

I don’t know how long I was there.

Eventually I heard a helicopter.

When rescuers reached me, one of them knelt in the snow.

“Ma’am, can you hear me?”

“My baby.”

“We’re going to take care of both of you.”

I grabbed his jacket.

“Don’t tell my husband.”

He stared at me.

“What?”

“Please. Don’t tell Derek Vaughn I’m alive.”

That sentence probably sounded insane.

Then I told him why.

I was taken to a hospital in northern Colorado under restricted information.

A sheriff’s investigator named Maria Ellis came into my room before sunrise.

She didn’t sit down at first.

“Your husband reported the fall.”

I looked at her.

“When?”

“About forty minutes after he says it happened.”

“Forty minutes?”

She nodded.

“He says you slipped. He says he tried to reach you.”

I looked at my right hand.

There were scratches across my palm from the rock.

Nothing from Derek.

“He didn’t try.”

Maria pulled a chair closer.

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

So I did.

When I reached the part about Paige and the fifty million dollars, Maria stopped writing.

“There’s a policy?”

“Yes.”

“Who benefits?”

“Derek.”

She leaned back.

“Anyone else who needs to know you’re alive?”

My father.

I hadn’t spoken to him properly in almost four months.

That was partly Derek’s doing.

Mostly, though, it was mine.

I called him from Maria’s phone.

Thomas Mercer answered on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Dad.”

Nothing.

Then I heard his chair scrape.

“Allison?”

“I’m alive.”

He made a sound I had never heard from my father.

I had to wait for him to stop asking questions.

Finally I said, “Dad, don’t tell anyone.”

“Derek told us they haven’t found you.”

“I know.”

“I’m coming.”

“Not yet. I need you to check something first.”

I looked at Maria.

“Check every financial transaction Derek authorized through Mercer Glass for the last two years.”

My father became quiet.

“Why?”

“Because he pushed me.”

Another silence.

Then:

“I’ll call you back.”

That was the first thing I did instead of waiting for Derek to decide what happened next.

The Papers I Had Signed

My father called six hours later.

He didn’t say hello.

“Almost three million dollars.”

I sat higher in the hospital bed.

“What?”

“Consulting payments. Spread out over eighteen months. I thought the board approved them.”

“To whom?”

“A company called Northstar Advisory.”

“Do you know it?”

“No.”

Neither did I.

That was bad enough.

Then Dad said, “There’s something else.”

A year earlier, while Mercer Glass was restructuring its family trust, I had signed an amendment.

If I died or became legally incapacitated, Derek could temporarily exercise the voting rights attached to my shares until my estate was settled.

I closed my eyes.

I remembered the papers.

They had been on our kitchen island beside my coffee.

Derek had tapped one yellow tab.

“Just the trust update.”

I had signed it while standing.

My shares weren’t a small family inheritance.

They represented one of the largest voting blocks in Mercer Glass.

If Derek controlled them, even temporarily, he could influence the board at exactly the moment the company was most vulnerable.

“Dad, freeze anything he can touch.”

“Already started.”

“And don’t tell him why.”

A nurse came in while I was still holding the phone.

She checked the monitor, looked at me, then checked it again.

“Allison, I’m calling your doctor.”

My contractions had started.

My son was born that evening.

Six pounds, eleven ounces.

William Thomas Mercer.

When the nurse put him against my chest, he opened his eyes for maybe two seconds and then went back to sleep.

Derek didn’t know he had a son.