Chapter 4 - The Mother's Secret
I froze entirely, expecting Evelyn to scream for Douglas and ruin everything we had worked for.
Garrett lost his balance in the shock of the moment and collapsed heavily onto the thick bedroom carpet.
I rushed to help him up, but Evelyn quickly closed the door and locked it behind her.
She did not yell or act surprised.
Instead, she walked over with tears streaming down her wrinkled face and helped me lift Garrett back into his wheelchair.
Evelyn touched her son's face gently, whispering that she knew he had been getting stronger.
She confessed that she had noticed the steam from the humidifier blocking the camera.
She also admitted that she knew Douglas and Gertrude were trying to steal the company, but she had been too terrified to speak up.
Douglas had threatened to put her in a terrible nursing home if she ever interfered with his plans.
Evelyn proved her loyalty by handing Garrett a small, encrypted thumb drive she had stolen from Gertrude's purse.
Garrett plugged the drive into his laptop while I kept watch at the bedroom door.
The files contained heavily redacted emails between Douglas and a rival biomedical corporation.
Douglas was planning to sell Garrett's company for a fraction of its worth in exchange for a massive, illegal kickback.
The final signature to authorize the sale was scheduled to happen at a private board meeting in this very house in two days.
Garrett realized he needed physical proof of the forged medical documents Douglas was using to bypass his authority.
Evelyn told us those documents were locked inside a safe in Douglas's home office on the first floor.
She knew the combination, but she was too frail to sneak past the security guards at night.
I volunteered to break into the office, knowing my background as a caregiver made me virtually invisible in this house.
At two in the morning, I crept silently down the dark hallway, avoiding the squeaky floorboards Evelyn had warned me about.
I slipped into Douglas's office and successfully opened the wall safe using the code Evelyn provided.
I found the forged medical proxy and slipped it into my pocket, my heart pounding with victory.
Just as I turned to leave, the heavy office door creaked open and the hallway light flicked on.
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A tall man stepped into the room, but it was not Douglas.
It was my ex-husband, Christopher.
