I stood up from my chair.
“What happened?”
Rachel stared at me silently for several seconds.
Then she whispered,
“I heard Mrs. Vanessa talking to someone.”
“Who?”
She said a name I knew very well.
“Kevin.”
My blood ran cold.
Vanessa had always introduced Kevin as a distant cousin. He came to our house frequently. Sometimes he helped with paperwork, and sometimes he drove Vanessa somewhere.
I had never suspected anything.
Rachel explained that she had been cleaning the hallway when she heard their voices coming from the room next door.
They thought she had already gone home.
Vanessa had said that I still had not signed the new will.
Kevin had angrily replied that she had waited far too long.
And then Vanessa said a sentence I still cannot forget.
“Once everything is in my name, Richard won’t be a problem anymore.”
I froze.
For months, Vanessa really had been constantly talking about my will.
On top of that, she had recently started organizing my heart medication herself.
Two weeks earlier, the brakes on my car had also failed.
At the time, I thought it was an accident.
After that night, I no longer did.
Rachel lowered her eyes.
“Mr. Richard, I desperately need this job. I still haven’t saved enough money for my mother’s surgery. But if I stayed silent and something happened to you, I could never forgive myself.”
I looked at that young woman standing in front of me.
Vanessa humiliated her every day.
She mocked her weight, her clothes, and her poverty.
And now Rachel was risking the job she desperately needed just to protect me.
The next morning, I called my attorney, Thomas.
Within a few days, what we discovered was even worse.
Kevin was not Vanessa’s cousin.
He had been her lover long before she ever met me.
Over the previous year, Vanessa had transferred more than one hundred thousand dollars from my accounts into various other accounts.
She had also prepared documents designed to give her complete control over my finances and medical decisions.
I immediately called my children.
Claire arrived first.
When I opened the door, she hugged me.
