Chapter 1
PART 2
That night, Mark laid beside me in bed and put on a display of fake tenderness.
“I’m sorry about what happened with your mom,” he murmured. “I only locked you in because I was terrified you’d crash the car driving so emotional. I was just trying to protect you.”
After a few minutes, he casually changed the subject.
“Ethan is young. He’s going to squander that land. Convince him to sign a power of attorney over to you; I have a notary who can help us sell it fast.”
He handed me a pre-drafted legal document. My mother had been dead for four days, and he had already calculated how to liquidate her life’s work.
I smiled with feigned sadness.
“Leave it with me. I’ll talk to my brother.”
Mark believed I had fallen back into line.
By day, I played the submissive wife. By night, I photographed my injuries, recorded dates, and obtained a certified medical evaluation from an urgent care clinic.
Mark’s old iPad was still logged into his messages. I unlocked it using Eleanor’s birthday.
I found a text thread with a woman named Chloe, who was pregnant.
“Did Evelyn get the signature yet?” Chloe had texted. “You promised you’d sell the land and buy us a condo before the baby arrives.”
In another chat, Mark referred to Chloe as his “real family” and called me “the old wife who’s still useful for paying the bills.”
But the fatal blow came from his text thread with his mother.
Mark owed over four hundred thousand dollars in illegal gambling debts to a local loan shark named Frank Vance. Eleanor knew about the debt and the pregnancy. They were planning to sell my mother’s land, pay off the loan shark, and buy Chloe a townhouse.
The night my mother died, while I was screaming in the dark storage closet, they were rummaging through my metal box searching for the deed.
I backed up every screenshot, wire transfer record, and voice memo to a secure cloud server. Then I returned the iPad to its spot.
May you like
The next morning, I told them Ethan refused to touch the inheritance until forty days had passed.
Mark slammed his fist on the dining table. Eleanor choked on her coffee. Their sheer panic confirmed the loan shark was putting intense pressure on them.
