I stood up from my chair.
“What happened?”
Emily stared at me silently for several seconds.
Then she whispered,
“I heard Mrs. Lauren talking to someone.”
“Who?”
She said a name I knew very well.
“Brian.”
My blood ran cold.
Lauren had always introduced Brian as a distant cousin. He came to our house frequently. Sometimes he helped with paperwork, and sometimes he drove Lauren somewhere.
I had never suspected anything.
Emily 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.
Lauren had said that I still had not signed the new will.
Brian had angrily replied that she had waited far too long.
And then Lauren said a sentence I still cannot forget.
“Once everything is in my name, George won’t be a problem anymore.”
I froze.
For months, Lauren 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.
Emily lowered her eyes.
“Mr. George, 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.
Lauren humiliated her every day.
She mocked her weight, her clothes, and her poverty.
And now Emily was risking the job she desperately needed just to protect me.
The next morning, I called my attorney, Robert.
Within a few days, what we discovered was even worse.
Brian was not Lauren’s cousin.
He had been her lover long before she ever met me.
Over the previous year, Lauren 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.
Sarah arrived first.
When I opened the door, she hugged me.
“Dad, I only wanted you to be safe.”
At that moment, I understood something painful.
For months, I had pushed away the people who truly loved me while defending the woman who saw me as nothing more than property.
When Lauren came home that evening, she walked into the living room and saw me sitting there with Sarah, Mike, my attorney, and Emily.
Her expression changed instantly.
She looked directly at Emily.
“You told him?”
