I FAKED A TRIP TO CANADA, SUSPECTING THE HOUSEKEEPER WAS HURTING MY DAUGHTERS
And the missing items — the earrings, the cash, the perfume Chloe had used to frame Marisol as a thief?
I had Hector pull the footage from the previous weeks. It didn’t take long. There was Chloe, on camera, taking her own earrings and cash and hiding them, building the story she’d fed me over candlelight, manufacturing a thief so she could get rid of the one person in the house who stood between her and my children.
She hadn’t just been cruel to my daughters.
She’d been running a calculated campaign to isolate them — to get the loyal housekeeper fired on false charges, so that when we married and I traveled, there’d be no witness, no protector, no one to stand between Chloe and two little girls she clearly saw as obstacles to the life she actually wanted, which was mine, and my money, without the inconvenience of my dead wife’s children.
I watched forty-five minutes of footage.
By the end, I wasn’t pale from shock anymore.
I was calm. Cold. Clear.
The way you get when you finally see a threat plainly, and you know exactly what you have to do to remove it from your children’s lives.
