The rescue worker’s name was Thomas.
When he reached the ledge, he immediately checked my pulse.
“Ma’am, your husband says you fell a few minutes ago.”
“He’s lying. He waited forty minutes.”
I showed him my cracked watch.
“It recorded everything.”
Thomas’s expression changed.
He switched off his personal radio before calling the gendarmerie directly.
At the hospital, the doctors performed an emergency C-section. My son was born with weak breathing, but he was alive. I had a fractured shoulder and several broken ribs, yet my spine was intact.
Damien was told that I had not survived the journey.
The gendarmerie arranged everything else.
A closed casket.
A brief ceremony.
A hidden camera among the flowers.
Damien played his part perfectly. He kissed relatives, shook hands, and told everyone that I had insisted on getting close to the edge despite his warnings.
Élise stayed beside him, her face expressionless.
Then Damien leaned toward the coffin.
“Now all that’s left is to find the copy.”
In the next room, the investigator stopped the recording.
“What copy is he looking for?”
I took a long breath.
Two weeks before the mountain, I had discovered a blue folder in Damien’s office. It contained transfers between our family business and several foreign companies.
The total came to exactly fifty million euros.
Damien had used my electronic signature to move the money. He then planned to make it look as though I had arranged the embezzlement before I died.
But he didn’t know that I had photographed every page.
The copy was inside the music box intended for our baby, at my notary’s office.
During the ceremony, a man approached Damien. He was the company’s financial director.
“The auditors are asking for the blue folder,” he whispered.
Damien looked around before answering:
“Blame her. A dead woman can’t defend herself.”
That sentence was enough.
The gendarmes entered the room.
Damien tried to leave through a side door, but Élise suddenly blocked his way.
“You promised she would only be injured,” she said.
He stared at her furiously.
“You knew everything.”
“I knew about the money. Not about the baby.”
The door to the adjoining room opened.
I appeared in a wheelchair, my arm immobilized and my face still marked by the fall.
A cry swept through the room.
Damien went white.
“That’s impossible…”
“You were right about one thing,” I told him. “A dead woman can’t defend herself.”
I held up my watch, sealed inside an evidence bag.
“But I’m not dead.”
Damien and Élise were arrested. She later agreed to hand over access to the accounts in exchange for cooperating with the investigation.
Most of the money was recovered, but not all of it.
I did not walk away from that mountain unscathed. My shoulder never fully regained its mobility, and certain sounds still brought me back to the moment his hand touched my back.
But my son survived.
I named him Thomas, after the rescue worker who believed my voice instead of my husband’s tears.
Damien had thought that fifty million euros would allow him to erase two lives.
He discovered that a single sentence, recorded by a broken watch, could destroy all his lies.
