Chapter 7
I dropped the laptop and ran to her, pulling her into my arms, holding her as tight as I could.
“No, baby,” I said, my voice breaking, rocking her back and forth. “No, it’s not true. It’s a fake. The bad lady made it with a computer to hurt us. I love you more than anything in the whole world. More than the company. More than money. More than anything. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. I would never, ever send you away. Never.”
She cried into my shirt for an hour, her little body shaking, until she was too exhausted to cry anymore and fell asleep in my arms.
I laid her in my bed, then went to the kitchen and called my tech team.
“Prove it’s fake,” I said, my voice cold with rage. “I don’t care what it takes. I want the proof on every news channel in the country by noon. And I want every platform that ran it to issue a retraction and an apology. Now.”
They worked for four hours straight.
They found the original audio clips Elena had used, from old interviews I’d given, from private phone calls she’d recorded, spliced together word by word to make the fake.
They released the proof at eleven, along with a full breakdown of how the AI had generated it, signed by the top three audio forensics experts in the world.
By noon, every major news outlet had run a retraction.
But the damage was done.
Millions of people had already heard the clip.
Millions of people already believed I hated my daughter.
Mia refused to go to school the next day, saying the kids would call her a liar, say her mom didn’t love her.
I stayed home with her, drawing pictures, watching movies, reminding her every ten minutes how much I loved her.
At two in the afternoon, there was a loud knock on the door.
It was two police officers, and behind them, a man I’d never seen before, holding a piece of paper.
“Clara Langford?” the man said, stepping forward. “I’m Detective Carter with the state police. I have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Richard Langford. We have a witness who says you paid him to poison your father.”
I stared at him, my blood running cold.
Elena had paid another witness.
Another lie.
I let them cuff me, quietly, so Mia wouldn’t see.
Rosa promised to stay with her, to tell her I had to go to a work meeting, that I’d be home soon.
I was in the holding cell for two days.
Sarah worked around the clock to prove the witness was lying.
She found the bank transfer: a hundred thousand dollars from an offshore account linked to Elena, sent to the witness’s account the day before he’d given his statement.
She found proof the witness had been in jail for fraud three times before, and had a long history of lying under oath.
The witness confessed the second Sarah confronted him with the evidence.
He said Elena had promised him another hundred thousand if he got me convicted.
I was released the next morning.
The FBI called me an hour after I got home.
“We got her,” the agent said, his voice relieved. “The Belarusian government pulled her plane’s landing permit at the last minute. She had to divert to Iceland. We have extradition treaties with Iceland. Local police arrested her when she landed. She’s on a plane back to the US right now. She’ll be in custody by tonight.”
I sank down onto the sofa, relief washing over me so strong I almost cried.
She was caught.
It was over.
Or so I thought.
That night, as Elena was being led off the plane in New York in cuffs, surrounded by FBI agents, she screamed at the cameras, her face twisted with rage.
“Clara Langford is a murderer!” she shrieked. “And if I go down, I’m taking Langford Group with me! I deleted every single file on the company server! All the contracts, all the payroll, all the product designs! Everything! The company will be bankrupt in forty-eight hours! You’ll all be on the street! And it’s all her fault!”
The cameras caught every word.
The stock price plummeted 40% in after-hours trading.
I called Marcus immediately.
“Get the IT team to Langford HQ,” I said. “Now. Check the servers. See if she’s telling the truth.”
He called me back twenty minutes later, his voice tight.
“She’s not lying,” he said. “Every core server is wiped clean. Payroll, client contracts, the new product line we were launching next month—all gone. The backups were on a server she kept in her penthouse. She smashed the hard drives with a hammer before she left. We have forty-eight hours to recover the data, or we can’t make payroll on Friday. Ten thousand employees will lose their jobs. The company will collapse.”
I hung up, grabbing my keys.
I drove to Langford headquarters, the big glass skyscraper Daddy had built, the building I’d played in as a kid, running up and down the hallways while Daddy worked.
The IT team was already there, dozens of them, working around the clock, their faces tight with stress.
I worked with them for twenty hours straight, drinking bad coffee, going through every old hard drive, every email account, every cloud backup we could find.
We found nothing.
All the core files were gone.
It was 10 PM the next night, twenty-two hours before payroll was due, when Leo—Elena’s old assistant, now working for us—ran into the server room, his face white.
“I found it!” he yelled, holding up a small, dusty external hard drive he’d pulled from the back of a filing cabinet in Elena’s old office. “She made a secret backup of everything three days before she fled. She was going to sell it to Halewood after the company collapsed. I forgot I’d seen her hide it there.”
We plugged it in.
Everything was there.
Every contract.
Every payroll file.
Every product design.
The whole team cheered, so loud the windows rattled.
I collapsed into a chair, exhausted, relief washing over me.
We’d saved the company.
We’d saved ten thousand jobs.
I drove home at two in the morning, ready to sleep for a week.
I was just pulling into the driveway when my phone rang.
It was the CEO of Halewood Textiles.
May you like
The man Elena had been going to sell the company to.
“Ms. Langford,” he said, his voice cold. “I’m sure you’re aware we just filed a hostile takeover bid for Langford Group. We’re offering a ten percent premium over the current stock price. The board is going to vote to accept it tomorrow morning. And if you try to stop us? I’ll release the last of the Voss Capital client data Elena gave me before she was arrested. Your firm will collapse. You’ll lose everything. You have until nine AM tomorrow to accept the deal and step down as CEO. Or I burn it all down.”
