He Faked My Signature, I Ruined His Career

"No!" I shot upright in bed, one hand pressed against my racing heart as I struggled to catch my breath. The panic lingered so vividly that it felt as though I had been ripped straight out of the nightmare. Maybe it was because the pain in that dream had felt so terrifyingly real. Whatever the reason, for the first time ever, Nathaniel Fairmont's familiar face left me feeling uneasy instead of comforted. Without even thinking about it, I turned away and dodged the hand he was reaching toward me. "I'm okay. Really. It's not my tooth. I just had a bad dream." Maybe I was imagining things, but for a split second, I thought I saw disappointment flash across Nathaniel's eyes before it vanished. I sank back beneath the covers and stared into the darkness above me. Sleep was impossible now. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the same thing, Nathaniel's cold, detached gaze from the dream, looking at me as if I meant nothing. Then came the memory of that final fall, the sickening weightlessness as I stepped off the edge of the building and plunged into empty air. I rubbed my left cheek where a faint twitch still lingered, but the gesture did little to calm the growing sense of dread settling inside me. Could it really have been nothing more than a dream? The room was completely silent. In that oppressive stillness, even the steady rhythm of Nathaniel's breathing felt strangely grating, scraping against my nerves. My gums pulsed painfully in time with my heartbeat. I was about to sit up and search for some anti-inflammatory medicine when something else caught my attention. Nathaniel's phone screen suddenly lit up in the darkness. For reasons I couldn't explain, I reached for it. Using his sleeping face to unlock the device, I opened it while he remained peacefully asleep beside me. The person texting him in the middle of the night was the same intern from my dream, Lily Parker. Even her profile picture was exactly the same as the face I had seen in that nightmare. Yet when I opened their conversation, there was almost nothing there. Aside from a newly sent cat sticker complaining about insomnia, the entire chat history was blank. That immediately felt wrong. Nathaniel never deleted messages, not once in all the years I'd known him. I checked several other conversations to make sure. Mine, his mother's, friends', coworkers', even promotional messages from insurance agents and financial planners—every single chat record had been carefully preserved. Which only made Lily's empty conversation stand out even more. I opened her social feed next. The young woman clearly loved sharing every detail of her life. Her page was filled with food photos, scenic snapshots, and plenty of carefully posed pictures of herself. I scrolled through them quickly, one post after another. Almost every update showed likes and comments from people who were mutual connections with Nathaniel. And yet Nathaniel himself had never liked, commented on, or interacted with a single post. But something about it still didn't sit right with me. When I opened those photos, every single image loaded instantly. There wasn't even the slightest delay, as if they had all been viewed recently and were already cached. A thought surfaced in my mind almost immediately. It felt less like nothing was there and more like someone had gone out of their way to make sure there was nothing left to find. Even so, I searched through his entire photo gallery from top to bottom. I checked every album I could find, but no matter how carefully I looked, I couldn't uncover a single additional clue. The payment records were the same story. I went through them one by one, yet nothing jumped out as suspicious. After hesitating for a moment, I opened Lily's social feed again. I was so focused on digging through her posts that I almost missed the change beside me. Nathaniel's calm, steady breathing suddenly grew uneven, as though he were waking up. My heart lurched. I immediately marked Lily's message as unread, carefully placed the phone back on the nightstand exactly where it had been, then closed my eyes and settled into a sleeping posture. Barely a second later, Nathaniel turned over and got out of bed to use the bathroom. I stayed perfectly still, holding my breath as I listened and waited. Normally, Nathaniel would be asleep again within minutes after a late-night bathroom trip. This time, however, he returned to bed, propped himself against the headboard, and picked up his phone. Unable to resist, I carefully lifted my eyelids just enough to peek. A faint green glow washed over Nathaniel's features, casting shifting shadows across his face in the dark room. Was he messaging Lily, the same one who couldn't sleep in the middle of the night? The more I thought about it, the more that nightmare felt like some kind of warning my instincts had been trying to give me. Or maybe the truth was even worse. Maybe it hadn't been a dream at all. My thoughts spiraled further and further out of control. Doubt, suspicion, fear, and denial collided in my head until I could barely separate one from another. At some point, I lost track of time completely. When exhaustion finally dragged me back into a restless sleep, the last thing I vaguely remembered seeing was Nathaniel staring at his phone with an unconcealed smile, a look of genuine pleasure spread across his face.