Company Accidentally Paid Severance To Me This Morning Despite It Not Being Announced Publicly And Claimed I Already "signed The Agreement" And Then Withdrew It (tn)

Location: Tennessee, US

To give some context, I received a notification from my bank that I had a check deposited from my employer that was the equivalent of a weeks' pay, a part of my bonus, and the equivalent of my monthly pay. I was very confused because I'm on bi-weekly pay and was not supposed to get paid until next Friday. On my statement, it specifically stated "severance compensation" at $12,000... which is my monthly salary pre-tax.

Candidly, I did have a pretty good idea that we would have layoffs and I knew I would probably be on the list due to the nature of my role and tenure, so I'm not worried about that and was thinking it would happen last week of the month. But I guess they are doing it in the next few hours.

When I saw this, I reached out to the COO and just straight up asked him and he more or less told me "welp, I'm probably on the list too buddy and call payroll/HR" and as soon as I reached out to payroll, they withdrew my deposit.

They claimed I had already signed a Docusign, sent me a copy, and I absolutely did not sign that and stated that knowledge of that infringed upon my NDA. So here are my questions:

1. My (soon-to-be former lol) employer is a publicly traded company where I have stock options. Obviously, I cannot disclose the impending layoff, but they made it sound like I'd have to re-negotiate my layoff since I had access to private information and received verbal confirmation on a recorded call (single party-state). I'm not going to act on that or anything but they implied that was an issue. Is that correct?

2. I absolutely did not sign that document. I actually have not even signed our 2026 handbook because they never asked me to and I unironically wrote 1/3 of it lol. Docusign obviously has traceability and that whole thing seemed really shifty. In the case that I get denied severance or "fired" for cause... what legal actions should I take?

I've known it was coming, but I didn't even as much imply I knew about it other than my wife's awareness I've been actively interviewing for new positions.