I had just sold my biotech company, Apex Biodine, for $60 million. To celebrate, I invited my only daughter, Emily, and her husband, Ryan Ford, to Laurangerie, the most expensive restaurant in the city, a glass-and-marble palace perched high above downtown San Francisco, all floor-to-ceiling windows and white tablecloths that probably cost more than my first month’s rent back in the seventies. I stepped away from the table to take the call, pacing across the plush carpet toward the lobby as the faint sound of a jazz trio drifted from the bar and the city lights glittered beyond the glass.
It was the bank in Zurich, confirming the wire transfer. When I turned to go back, a young waiter blocked my path. He was terrified.
“Mr. Shaw,” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder toward the dining room, “I saw your daughter. When your son-in-law distracted you, she took a small vial from her purse and poured a powder into your wine.”
My blood ran cold, but I stayed calm.
I walked back to the table, “accidentally” knocked over a water glass, and in the confusion, I switched my glass with Emily’s. Fifteen minutes later, her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed. Before I tell you exactly what happened in that restaurant, let me know in the comments where you’re reading this from—and think for a second about whether you believe that sometimes the people closest to you are the ones you know the least.
My name is Peter Shaw. I’m sixty-eight years old, and for the last three years I’ve been a widower. That $60 million wasn’t just a number on a screen.
It was the result of forty years of my life, starting in a rented garage in Palo Alto with two employees, a second-hand centrifuge, and a dream I could barely afford. Despite the success, I never really changed. I still live in the same three-bedroom ranch house on a quiet California cul-de-sac that I bought with my late wife, Laura, back when interest rates were double digits and we were counting quarters for gas.
I still drive a seven-year-old sedan that smells faintly of coffee and old leather. Laura—she was the smart one. She saw the world with a clarity I often lacked.
And she never, not once, trusted Ryan. she’d warned me, her voice gentle but firm as we sat on our little back porch under the string lights she insisted on keeping up year-round. I’d always laugh it off.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
