Page 32 of The Library on Plum Island
“Are you okay, Dani?” Harley asked her gently.
Daniella nodded and pinched the bridge of her nose. “It’s just hard to remember all this because it marks the start of a truly awful time when it felt like my world was thrown off its axis, and I wasn’t the one in control of which way it spun.”
“You don’t have to continue if you don’t want to,” Jennifer assured her.
“No, it’s time to get it all out,” Daniella smiled gratefully. “I went to the dinner and was running late, and to my surprise, when I got there, I found that mine and Gail’s seats had been taken away.”
“Like no longer a place at the table taken away?” Ethan clarified.
“Yes.” Daniella took a breath. “I was not amused when I was led to a table for two and told that Doctor Jackson had organized it.”
“No, he didn’t!” Jennifer gasped. “How forward.”
“I made no attempt to cover my annoyance, but I didn’t want to make a scene as all the hospital board members were there.” Daniella felt her cheeks heat as though the thought still had the power to make her angry. “I felt like I’d been trapped into an intimate dinner with Doctor Jackson. I told him that I was uncomfortable with the arrangements, and he was all apologetic. His excuse was that he thought I’d be upset after my friend had been injured.”
“Lame!” Jennifer spat.
“I made it through the evening, and as soon as I could, made an excuse that I had to get home,” Daniella continued the story. “Much to my displeasure, Doctor Jackson also decided to call it a night and made sure I was once again trapped into sharing a cab with him.” She shook her head. “Two of the main board members were leaving at the same time as us. They were sharing a cab, and when they asked us where we stayed, it was in the same direction. The one member is all about going green and basically shamed me into sharing a cab with the man.”
“Wow!” Ethan breathed. “The man is one heck of a strategist.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Daniella assured him. “I don’t know why, but halfway to my house, I pretended to get a message from Carly and made the cab driver go to her house.”
“I was selling it at the time,” Carly told them.
“I tried to have the cab driver drop him off first, but he insisted on seeing me there safely.” Daniella shuddered again. “When I got out, he followed, and as I turned to say goodbye, he grabbed me and kissed me. I immediately pushed him away and told him that was not appropriate, that I have no idea why he’d think it was, and made it clear I had no affection for him whatsoever.”
“What he didn’t know was that a member of the paparazzi was waiting for Carly and had taped the entire thing,” Sam said with a grin.
“I also found out a few days later that he lived nowhere near me,” Daniella told them.
“Daniella’s rebuff became a challenge to him,” Sam added. “He started cornering her at work, sending her flowers and gifts, all of which she made her assistant document and take back to his office.”
“I just kept rebuffing his advances and rejecting his gifts,” Daniella told them, “until the accident with Stanley Wells and his fiancée. Then his mind games took another turn. He found a way to attack my career.”
“When Daniella won the case, thanks to Paige, Doctor Jackson had managed to convince the board to make him the medical director,” Sam told them. “Once he was in charge, he had even more power over Daniella’s career. She started looking for another position and was about to accept a partnership in private practice, but before she could take the offer, Doctor Jackson managed to get her declared mentally unfit to operate. He had her working under supervised practice.”
“The worst part is that the majority of the staff at the hospital backed him up,” Daniella snorted. “The thing is, subconsciously, I knew what he was doing, but I was so busy trying to avoid the man that I ended up playing into his hands. Staging scenarios where it would show me as becoming emotionally unstable and mentally unhinged.”
“All the while, he’d torment Daniella, stalking her in the corners where there were no witnesses to make sure Daniella knew all that was happening to her was her fault,” Sam explained. “He’d wait for her in the parking garage and tell her it could all stop. All she had to do was admit she had feelings for him as he knew she felt the same about him as he did her.”
“Good grief!” Jennifer’s eyes widened and filled with compassion when she looked at Daniella. “I’m so sorry you went through that. And NONE of that was your fault.”
“I know.” Daniella’s voice dropped. “I became the object of hospital gossip and pitying stares as if I truly was losing my mind. He had me followed by the same detective agency that Stanley Wells went to work for when the man became obsessed with proving his fiancée died because of my neglect.”
“Daniella worked in that environment for five months and eventually quit,” Sam picked up the story. “She had enough savings, her inheritance from her parents, and Tom’s insurance money. Enough for her and Emily to live comfortably on.”
“Until my accounts were hacked and all my money disappeared,” Daniella’s throat went dry. “But the funds were shown to have been used on numerous online gambling sites, paying off loan sharks, and making extravagant purchases.”
“So he made you look like you had a gambling addiction?” Ethan stared at her in disbelief.
Daniella nodded and continued. “By this point, Uncle Sam had already started talking to his contacts at the US Marshal’s office, but we had nothing to pin on him. I put my house up for sale, and I was going to move to New York to live with Carly until I could clear my name in the medical world,” Daniella told them. “The day we were about to leave, I got a call that Gail had been badly injured. Emily was still at school when I rushed to the hospital, but when I got there, Gail was as shocked as I was that she’d been in an accident.”
“Daniella called me and told me what had happened,” Sam said. “While I was on the phone with her, she got a call from the school. When Daniella’s fiance had collected Emily, she’d forgotten her blazer and pencil bag.”
“No!” Jennifer and Ethan paled.
“I was on hold when Daniella’s panicked voice hit me through the phone. All she said was he’d taken her!” Sam blew out a breath, and Daniella could see the story was upsetting him, too.
