Chapter 8 - Serena Wanted Laura’s House
The Westchester house had been sold by Laura’s parents years earlier.
Laura dreamed of buying it back.
She couldn’t.
By the time the property returned to market, she was already sick.
Victor had offered to purchase it.
Laura refused.
She said chasing childhood wouldn’t save her.
Then she died.
Years later, Serena quietly began pursuing the property.
That seemed bizarre.
She had no emotional connection to it.
So why?
The answer sat inside one of Laura’s letters.
Not to Victor.
To Ethan.
For your eighteenth birthday.
Victor had stored the unopened letters in a fireproof archive.
He did not open Ethan’s.
Good.
But Laura had also left a summary with her estate attorney explaining why the house mattered.
There was a family cemetery on adjoining land.
Her mother’s ashes were buried there.
Laura wanted Ethan to know where part of his maternal family came from.
Serena discovered that.
She apparently decided buying the property would make her indispensable to Victor.
A grand gesture.
Return Laura’s childhood home to Ethan.
Become the woman who completed something the dead wife couldn’t.
It sounded romantic.
Until we saw how she planned to finance it.
By stealing from the very care fund Laura created for her son.
Victor looked genuinely sick.
“She wanted to give Ethan something with Ethan’s own money.”
Yes.
And call it love.
Then the accountant found a draft email on Serena’s household computer.
She had written it to a realtor but never sent it.
My husband will see that I’m the one who protects his son’s legacy now.
That sentence revealed something deeper than greed.
Competition.
Serena wasn’t only living with Victor.
She was competing with a dead woman.
Laura’s photographs.
Laura’s letters.
Laura’s trust.
Even Ethan’s attachment to me threatened her because I had been hired during Laura’s final months.
I belonged to the old household.
Serena wanted to become the center of the new one.
Then I remembered her favorite insult.
Lowly maid.
It wasn’t simply class contempt.
I represented a role Serena could never control.
I had known Laura.
Barely.
But enough.
Laura interviewed me herself when Ethan was three months old.
She had held my hand and said:
“If I’m not here, make sure people listen when he cries.”
I had promised.
I had nearly forgotten those words.
Now they felt like an accusation.
Because for months Ethan’s therapy disappeared, his routines changed, and Serena isolated the people who questioned her.
I had noticed pieces.
I hadn’t put them together.
Then Victor asked me:
“Did Laura know Serena?”
I froze.
I didn’t think so.
But there was one photograph I remembered.
A hospital fundraiser.
Laura standing beside a woman in burgundy.
The woman’s face half turned from the camera.
I went through old digital albums.
Victor watched over my shoulder.
We found it.
Laura.
Serena.
May you like
Together.
Two years before Victor claimed to have met Serena.
