PART 5
“Sign the papers, Grace,” Vanessa said in the recording. “Ethan doesn’t need this house. He’ll go wherever the Army tells him. But I deserve something stable.”
My mother’s voice shook.
“It belongs to my son.”
Vanessa laughed.
“He belongs to me.”
The blood in my body went cold.
The next clip showed Vanessa standing over my mother’s medication tray.
She picked up two bottles, read the labels, then moved one into the wrong compartment.
My mother gasped behind me.
“I knew it,” she whispered. “I knew I wasn’t taking them wrong.”
Vanessa’s face went gray.
“Ethan, I can explain.”
I did not look at her.
Another clip opened.
Vanessa was on the phone in the hallway.
“I don’t care how you do it,” she whispered. “Just get the transfer papers ready. If the old woman signs, Ethan won’t question it. He trusts me.”
A man’s voice answered through the speaker.
“And if she doesn’t?”
Vanessa said, “Then I’ll make her look incompetent.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“Who was that?”
Vanessa shook her head.
“No one.”
Then the doorbell rang downstairs.
All three of us went still.
Vanessa’s eyes flashed toward the hallway.
May you like
I understood.
She had not been working alone.
