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Axel Cuvier, 1337 N San Joaquin Street, San Diego, CA (2026)

01/10/2026

My mom posted a photo: 'Family vacation! So peaceful, no drama!'. They were at my $4.7 million beach house in Malibu. I had never given them permission. They planned the whole trip without me. I was exhausted from being treated like a walking ATM instead of a daughter. I called my property manager: “Change all the codes. Now.” Right at midnight, they couldn’t get into the house, left standing on the sand with all their luggage. But this was only the beginning.
My name is Aurora. I was sitting in a glass-walled boardroom in downtown Seattle, the kind that overlooks the gray water and the tiny Space Needle in the distance. It was the biggest meeting of my year. My phone was face down on the polished table, buzzing against the wood. Normally, I ignore it when I’m with investors. But this time, for some reason I still can’t explain, I turned it over.
A notification from Instagram. From my mother.
I shouldn’t have opened it. I knew that. But I slid my thumb across the screen anyway. The photo flooded the display: my mother, my father, and my sisters laughing on a wide wooden deck, glasses of white wine in their hands, the Pacific Ocean stretching blue and endless behind them. I recognized the view instantly. The infinity pool. The white linen outdoor sofa I’d imported from Italy. The line where the Malibu coastline curves along the Pacific Coast Highway.
They were in my beach house.
I hadn’t given them the keys. I hadn’t told them they could go. I hadn’t even known they were in California. While I sat in a blazer under fluorescent lights talking about market share, my family was barefoot in my sanctuary, living in a life I built, as if it had always belonged to them.
Then I read the caption under my mother’s post.
“Finally, peace without the drama.”
I didn’t need a mirror to know who “the drama” was.
My chest went tight. I swiped to the next photo. My mother was on my white linen sofa, the one I’d told her about on the phone. “It’s delicate, so please, no red wine on the cushions,” I’d said months ago. In the photo, she was holding a full glass of red, her dirty sandals dug into the fabric, smiling that wide church-perfect smile she uses for social media.
Swipe.
My dad was at my stainless steel built-in grill I hadn’t even used yet, wearing a baseball cap that said “RELAX MODE,” flipping burgers like he was the king of the castle. Swipe. My sister Jessica was in my primary bedroom, wearing my silk robe with my initials embroidered on the pocket, pouting into my mirror. Her caption: “Living the dream. vacationmode Malibu.”
Then I made the mistake of reading the comments.
My aunt from Ohio: “So glad you guys are getting a break. You deserve it!”
A neighbor from our old Midwest street: “Wow, is that a rental? Looks so expensive!”
And right under that, my mother’s reply: “No, it’s Aurora’s place. She said we could use it whenever we wanted. So blessed to have such a generous daughter.”
I nearly dropped the phone. Four weeks earlier, I had told them clearly that the Malibu house was off-limits for a while, that I wasn’t ready for guests, that I needed space. They didn’t like the answer, so they rewrote it. “No” became “whenever we wanted,” and the whole town back home got to watch the lie play out over the Pacific.
Across the table, the investor from New York was talking about scalability. I heard my name once.
“Aurora?”
I stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said, voice steady. “There’s a family situation I need to handle. My team can finish the deck.” I walked out of the boardroom, down the hallway, into the elevator, and only when the doors slid shut did I let myself breathe.
Seattle rain smeared across my windshield as I drove north on I-5 toward my apartment. I thought about calling. I could already hear the script.
Mom, that house is off-limits.
“Oh, stop being dramatic. We’re just family. You weren’t even using it.”
If I pushed back, I’d be selfish. If I stayed quiet, I’d be a doormat. Either way, I lost.
So when I got home, I didn’t call. I opened my laptop instead. In a quiet apartment overlooking the Seattle skyline, I logged into my smart-home dashboard. Live feeds from Malibu lit up my second monitor. My dad’s beat-up truck and a shiny rental convertible in the driveway. My sister sprawled across my 85-inch TV room couch, scattering chip crumbs on the leather. My mother in my California kitchen, scraping one of my copper pans with a rough sponge that made me wince through the screen.
I checked the access log. There it was: yesterday afternoon, entry code used – “MOM–EMERGENCY.” The code I’d set up years ago in case I landed in the hospital or the house caught fire. They’d kept it. They’d tried it. It worked.
I picked up my phone and called Mark, my Malibu property manager.
“It’s Aurora,” I said. “That ‘activity’ you saw at the house? It’s my family. They’re there without permission.”
His tone shifted from friendly to professional in a heartbeat. “Do you want me to call the sheriff, or do you want to handle it another way?”
Not the police. Not yet. My mother lived for scenes. Sirens in the driveway would become her favorite story for the next decade.
“I want every code on that property changed,” I said. “Gate, front door, garage, Wi-Fi, streaming accounts. Everything.”
“I can do it right now,” Mark replied.
I looked at the clock. Late afternoon in Seattle. Late afternoon in California. The sun still high over the Pacific. I could see them in the camera feeds, settling in for the night, pouring more wine, starting the gas fire pit I paid for, completely sure the world revolved around their comfort.
“Not now,” I said. “Wait until midnight Pacific.”
There was a quiet pause on the line. “Understood.”
We went over the details. At 12:00 a.m., the system would reboot. Codes would vanish. The Wi-Fi would reset. The alarm would flip to away mode.
Hours later, I sat at my desk with a simple salad and a glass of water, Seattle lights blinking outside my window while the Malibu sky faded into a velvet black on my second screen. My mother posed for another selfie by the pool. My sister held up her wine like she was on some reality show. My father yawned in my lounger, completely at ease.
On my laptop, the digital clock crept toward 12:00 a.m. Pacific. My thumb hovered over the confirmation slider in the app, the one that would flip everything from “welcome” to “access denied.”
And in that quiet second, with Seattle rain against the glass and the Pacific crashing unheard on the other side of the country, I finally understood this wasn’t just about a house.
It was about what happens when the bank decides to close.
Full in the first c0mment

01/10/2026

I drove six hours through a major storm to celebrate my son’s birthday. I was carrying $80,000 worth of gifts. I stood right outside the door and heard my daughter-in-law’s voice drift out: "It would be even better if she doesn’t show up tonight—then the beach house will be mine, and my love’s.” My son laughed along with her. I left without a word. And a month later, their “perfect” life…
The rain came down hard enough to blur the lane markers, and the highway signs kept flashing weather warnings like they were trying to talk me out of my own plan.
Still, I drove past dark exits and half-lit gas stations, past porches where little American flags snapped in the wind, telling myself I was doing this because I’m a mother and because this is what mothers do when their only child asks.
The gifts sat in the backseat, wrapped clean and pretty, the kind of presentation that’s supposed to say, I trust you.
One box was sentimental, the kind you hold onto for years waiting for the right moment.
Another was practical, the kind a grown man claims he needs when he’s “finally getting his life together.”
And the last one was the heavy one, the one worth nearly $80,000, the one I thought might make him look at me like I mattered again.
By the time I reached his building, my hair was damp, my shoes were soaked, and my chest felt tight from the drive and the hope I kept forcing myself to carry anyway.
I climbed the stairs, listening to muffled music and laughter leaking out from behind doors, smelling someone’s dinner drifting through the hallway like nothing in the world was wrong.
I stopped at my son’s door and lifted my hand to knock.
That’s when I heard her voice—smooth, amused, unguarded.
Not angry, not scared, just casually cruel, like she was describing a favor the storm could do for her.
For half a second, my brain tried to reshape it into something harmless.
A joke, a misunderstanding, a sentence that didn’t mean what it sounded like.
Then my son laughed with her, like the punchline belonged to him too.
I stood there with my keys digging into my palm, staring at the door as if it might change into a different door with a different life behind it.
Inside, they kept talking, comfortable and confident, like I wasn’t right outside, soaked from the weather and shaking for a reason that had nothing to do with the cold.
I didn’t ring the bell.
I didn’t step in and demand an explanation, because I could already feel the truth settling into place, heavy and final.
I backed away quietly, one step at a time, until the hallway opened into the stairwell, and then I was outside again with the rain hitting my face like a wake-up call.
In my car, the wipers thumped back and forth like a heartbeat that couldn’t calm down.
The gifts sat behind me, untouched, and for the first time all night, I stopped thinking about what they cost and started thinking about what they meant.
When I finally got home, the house was silent in that pre-dawn way that makes everything feel brutally honest.
I didn’t even take the gifts out of the car.
I walked straight to my kitchen table, opened my laptop, and started a new note with a single word at the top.
A word that wasn’t emotional.
A word that was practical.
And once I typed it, I realized the next part of this story was going to happen fast.
Full in the first c0mment

01/10/2026

Four years ago, my sister stole my rich fiancé. At our father’s funeral, she smirked and said, “Poor you, still single at 38. I got the man, the money, the mansion.” I smiled. “Have you met my husband?” I called him over—her smile vanished, her hands trembled… She recognized him instantly… and froze…
Vanessa timed it like she always did—right when the room got quiet enough for her cruelty to feel like a performance. We stood near my father’s casket while soft piano music drifted through the funeral home, and she leaned in close, earrings flashing as if grief were just another accessory. “It’s almost sad,” she whispered, eyes flicking over my simple black dress like it offended her.
Behind her, Darren stood by the guest book, polished and familiar, like a mistake that had learned how to wear expensive shoes. Four years ago, he had slipped a ring on my finger and promised forever. Two months before the wedding, I walked into his office early with dinner in my hands and found my sister where my future was supposed to be. I didn’t scream. I didn’t throw anything. I just left, drove until the skyline changed, and rebuilt my life in Seattle with quiet, stubborn breath.
Rebuilding didn’t look cinematic back then. It looked like cheap takeout, a cramped apartment, and showing up to work with puffy eyes anyway. It looked like learning to laugh again without checking if anyone was about to take it from me. It looked like therapy, new routines, and saying “no” for the first time in my life without apologizing.
Then Marcus happened in the most ordinary way—through work, through respect, through consistency that didn’t feel like a trap. He didn’t chase my wounds. He didn’t demand explanations. He just showed up, again and again, until I stopped flinching at kindness. Two years ago, he became my husband, not as a headline, not as revenge, but as proof that my life didn’t end when theirs started.
Vanessa didn’t know any of that. She only knew how to measure worth in shiny things, so she delivered her line like she’d been saving it. “Poor you, still single at thirty-eight,” she said louder this time, just enough for nearby relatives to hear. “I got the man, the money, the mansion.” Her mouth curved into that smirk I’d hated since we were teenagers.
Something in me went calm—so calm it scared me. I looked at her, then at Darren, then at the faces drifting our way, drawn by tension the way people are drawn to thunder before rain. Vanessa waited for my cheeks to burn, for my voice to crack, for the old version of me to shrink.
Instead, I smiled. Not sweet. Not bitter. Just steady.
“Have you met my husband?” I said.
Vanessa blinked, like the words didn’t fit into her script. I turned slightly and lifted my hand toward the back of the room, where Marcus had been giving my mother space, quietly present the way he always was. He started walking toward us, cutting through black coats and murmured condolences, his posture calm, his gaze locked on mine like a promise.
When he reached us, he took my hand first—warm, grounding—and then he offered his other hand to Vanessa with polite, effortless confidence. “Marcus Hamilton,” he said.
Darren’s face tightened so fast it looked painful. Vanessa’s smirk collapsed like wet paper. Her fingers trembled as they met Marcus’s handshake, and the moment her eyes landed on him—really landed—her entire body went still.
Like she’d just remembered a name she wasn’t supposed to recognize.
Like she’d just seen a man she thought she’d buried in the past.
Like she’d just realized this funeral wasn’t the stage she owned.
And she froze.
Full in the first c0mment

01/09/2026

I had just been released from the hospital after giving birth—my body sore, my legs unsteady, my newborn daughter asleep against my chest. A nurse helped me into a wheelchair and asked softly, “Is your husband here to take you home?”
I scanned the entrance, my heart sinking. Daniel wasn’t there.
Ten minutes later, my phone rang.
“Emily, take the bus home,” Daniel said impatiently. “I’m busy.”
I went still. “Daniel, I just gave birth. I can barely stand.”
He let out an exaggerated sigh, like I was a burden. “Stop overreacting. The bus stop is right outside the hospital. I’m having the driver take my parents and my sister out for hotpot—they’re hungry.”
Before I could say another word, the call ended.
Moments later, I watched in disbelief as Daniel’s black Maybach passed the hospital doors. Through the tinted glass, I saw his mother laughing, his sister recording videos on her phone, and Daniel sitting comfortably in the back seat. None of them even glanced in my direction.
With shaking hands, I pulled my coat tighter, held my baby closer, and slowly walked to the bus stop. Every jolt of the ride felt like punishment. Some passengers stared with sympathy, others whispered. A few offered their seats. I swallowed my humiliation in silence.
When I got home, I placed my daughter in her crib and finally let myself cry. This wasn’t the first time Daniel had treated me this way. Ever since his startup began making money, he had changed—showing off luxury cars, expensive dinners, and constantly reminding me, “Without me, you’d be nothing.”
What he never bothered to ask was where that first money had come from.
Two hours later, my phone started vibrating nonstop. Calls and messages poured in from Daniel, his mother, his sister—dozens of missed calls. Confused, I answered one.
“Emily!” Daniel sounded frantic. “Where are you? Something awful just happened.”
Before I could respond, his mother grabbed the phone, shouting, “Tell me the truth right now—who are you really?”
At that exact moment, a breaking news alert appeared on my screen: Daniel Carter’s company declared bankrupt after all major funding was suddenly withdrawn.
I looked down at my sleeping daughter. For the first time that day, I felt calm.
Then I smiled.
To be continued in the comments 👇

01/09/2026

My son and his wife went on a trip, leaving me to care for her mother—who they said “wouldn’t wake up” after an accident. They left me alone with her mother. But the moment they walked out… she opened her eyes.
I didn’t even hear their car reach the end of the driveway before the house turned stranger, like it had been holding its breath for them.
Grant had called on Tuesday with a voice that sounded practiced. “Seattle,” he said. “Four days, maybe five. The nurse comes twice a day. You just need to be there, Mom.”
Emily’s voice hovered behind his, too quick and too bright. She thanked me before I’d fully agreed, like she couldn’t risk the word no landing in the air.
By Thursday morning I was standing on their Riverside porch, watching sprinklers sweep the same perfect arc across three identical lawns. A tiny flag tucked into a planter moved in the breeze, and the neighborhood looked like it had been designed to make bad things feel impossible.
Inside, everything smelled like lemon polish and cold air. The refrigerator had a neat schedule under a magnet, the counters were empty, the living room was staged like a listing photo.
In the guest room, her mother lay in a hospital bed beneath a framed landscape print. The monitor blinked softly, the tubing hissed, and her chest rose and fell with the kind of steady calm that should’ve reassured me.
Instead, it made my palms go damp.
Someone had brushed her silver hair and touched color onto her lips, as if the goal was to make her look peacefully gone while she was still here. Emily stood beside the bed and said, gently, “She won’t wake up,” but her eyes didn’t soften when she looked at her mother.
Grant kissed my cheek like an errand. He reminded me of the nurse’s times, pointed at the bottles lined up in the kitchen, and then both of them rolled their luggage across the floor without looking back.
The lock clicked. The door shut. Silence dropped into place like a lid.
I tried to be normal. I unpacked my overnight bag. I checked the schedule again. I walked the hallway twice, telling myself I was being dramatic, telling myself I was lucky he’d called me at all.
Then I went back to the guest room, because the beeping was the only sound that felt honest.
I adjusted the blanket, smoothed a corner that didn’t need smoothing, and brushed my fingers across her forehead in the same way I used to check Grant’s temperature when he was small.
Her eyes snapped open.
Not cloudy. Not wandering. Clear, focused, fixed on me like a spotlight. I stepped back so fast my heel caught the rug, and her hand closed around my wrist with a strength that made my stomach drop.
“Thank God,” she whispered, voice rough but steady. “I was afraid they’d never leave you alone with me.”
The room tightened. The machines kept blinking. My heart started pounding loud enough to drown out the monitor.
She didn’t look like a woman who “wouldn’t wake up.” She looked like a woman who had been forced to stay quiet.
Her gaze flicked toward the doorway, then toward the ceiling corner, where a small white sensor sat too neatly placed. “Don’t react,” she breathed. “And don’t say my name.”
I leaned in, and she swallowed hard like each second cost her something. “They didn’t bring you here to help me,” she murmured. “They brought you here so you can—”
My phone buzzed softly in my pocket.
When I pulled it out, the screen lit my palm with a single notification: the doorbell camera had gone offline.
Maryanne saw the glow and squeezed my hand until it hurt, her eyes holding a certainty that felt colder than fear. From the kitchen, a gentle chime sounded, like a timer ending.
And as I bent closer to catch the rest of her sentence, I realized the “trip” was just the cover story.
Full in the first c0mment

01/09/2026

I secretly installed twenty-six hidden cameras throughout my house, convinced I would catch my nanny neglecting her duties. By then, my heart had frozen solid—hardened by a billion-dollar empire and shattered by the sudden, devastating loss of my wife. I believed I was safeguarding my children from an outsider. I had no idea I was actually watching an angel wage a quiet battle against my own family.
I Monitored My Nanny to Catch Her “Doing Nothing”—and Uncovered a Terrifying Truth About My Twin Sons and the Mother They Lost…
My name is Alistair Thorne. At forty-two, I was a man who appeared to have everything—until the night the world went silent. My wife, Seraphina, an internationally acclaimed cellist, died four days after giving birth to our twin sons, Leo and Noah. Doctors labeled it a “postpartum complication,” one no one could ever fully explain.
I was left alone in a $50-million glass mansion in Seattle with two newborns and a grief so heavy it felt like I was drowning with every breath. Noah was strong and healthy. Leo wasn’t. His cries were sharp and rhythmic, like a siren that never stopped. His tiny body would tense, his eyes rolling back in a way that made my blood run cold.
The specialist, Dr. Julian Vane, dismissed it as “colic.”
My sister-in-law, Beatrice, offered another explanation—that I was “emotionally distant” and the boys needed a “proper family environment.” What she really wanted was for me to sign over guardianship so she could control the Thorne Trust.
Then Elena entered our lives.
THE GIRL NO ONE SAW
Elena was twenty-four, a nursing student juggling three jobs. She spoke little, blended into the background, and never asked for a raise. She made only one request: to sleep in the nursery with the twins.
Beatrice despised her.
“She’s lazy,” Beatrice murmured one evening at dinner. “I saw her sitting in the dark for hours doing nothing. Who knows—maybe she’s stealing Seraphina’s jewelry while you’re gone. You should keep an eye on her.”
Fueled by grief and suspicion, I spent $100,000 on the most advanced infrared surveillance system money could buy. I told no one—especially not Elena. I wanted to catch her red-handed.
For two weeks, I avoided the footage, burying myself in work. But on a rainy Tuesday at 3:00 a.m., unable to sleep, I finally opened the encrypted feed on my tablet.
I expected to see Elena asleep.
I expected to see her rifling through my things.
Instead, the night-vision screen showed her sitting on the floor between the two cribs. She wasn’t resting. She was holding Leo—the fragile twin—pressed against her bare chest, skin to skin, just as Seraphina had once described.
But that… wasn’t the shock.
This is only half of the story. To be continued in 1st comment 👇

01/09/2026

After earning my master’s degree, I asked for a raise after four years running the family company without a single day off. My dad said I was “lucky to have this job,” turned me down, then hired my “golden child” sister—who was less experienced—at three times my salary, so I quit. A week later, a competitor offered a salary 45% higher…
And the wild part is how quiet everything got the second I stopped being the person who made the chaos look “stable.”
For four years, I lived on warehouse hours outside Raleigh, the kind of mornings where the air smells like rain-soaked asphalt and diesel, and the radio in the loading bay argues about the Wolfpack before the sun even clears the trees.
No weekends, no holidays, no real “off” switch. My phone could hijack dinner, sleep, even a shower, because if a route broke or a crew got swapped last minute, everyone acted like the whole day would collapse unless I touched it.
I didn’t show up expecting special treatment because my last name was on the trucks. I showed up in steel-toe boots, hair tied back, clipboard in hand, learning the floor from the ground up so no one could claim I was just “the boss’s kid.”
Somewhere along the way, “helping” became “running it.” I tightened routes, cleaned up schedules, stopped equipment from disappearing into the void, and built a system that made the place feel predictable instead of panicked.
Clients stopped calling angry. Crews stopped guessing. The dispatch screen stopped blinking like a warning sign every hour, because the decisions were finally organized instead of improvised.
At night, I earned my master’s degree the hard way, laptop open after fourteen-hour days, studying operations and supply chain theory while my eyes burned and my body begged for rest. I told myself I wasn’t chasing a title, I was chasing fairness, because the role I was doing had outgrown the pay I was being handed.
When I finally asked my dad for a raise, I didn’t bring emotion. I brought benchmarks, responsibilities, outcomes, the calm language you use when you want respect instead of sympathy.
He didn’t really look. He leaned back, smiled like he was doing me a favor just by letting me speak, and said, “You’re lucky to have this job.”
The words landed like a quiet slap, not loud enough for anyone else to hear, but sharp enough to change how I saw the last four years. Lucky, as if endurance was the currency of love in this family, and I was supposed to be grateful for being drained.
Two days later, he called an all-hands meeting in the warehouse. People whispered about growth, new opportunities, maybe another location down the highway.
Then my sister walked in polished and confident, like she’d stepped out of a different world than the one with pallet jacks and early-morning sweat. My dad gave her a shiny leadership title and talked about “energy” and “fresh perspective” while everyone clapped because that’s what you do when the owner is smiling.
Afterward, I asked one practical question, the kind you ask when you’re the person who’s been keeping the numbers from turning into a mess. He dodged once, then finally admitted it.
Her pay was triple mine, with perks I’d never been offered, even after four years of doing the work that kept the company steady.
That’s when I understood this wasn’t a business move. It was a message, delivered in broad daylight, designed to teach me where I stood.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t explode. I went back to my desk, finished the day, went home, and wrote my resignation like I was closing out any other task.
A week later, a North Carolina number lit up my screen, and a voice I didn’t know said they’d been watching how our operations suddenly started running smoother. They wanted to talk to the person behind it.
I stared at the offer long enough for my screen to dim, my thumb hovering over the callback, and I realized the real cliff wasn’t the money. It was what I was about to do next—because once I said yes, there was no going back to being “lucky.”
Full in the first c0mment

01/09/2026

My son called and said, “I’m getting married tomorrow. I withdraw all the money from your bank accounts and sold the house. Bye!” I just laughed. He didn't know that the house was actually…
My name is Margaret Thornton. I’m 62, and I live in a quiet stretch of suburban Ohio where the mornings smell like coffee and wet leaves, and the loudest drama usually comes from a neighbor’s barking dog. I work part-time at the local library, I keep my routines small and steady, and I thought that kind of life made you safe.
Then Derek called.
My only child. Thirty-four years old. Always reaching, always climbing, always speaking like the world owed him one more step up. When his father died while Derek was still growing into his shoulders, I raised him alone. Two jobs. Cheap shoes. Late nights. The kind of sacrifice you don’t announce—you just do it, because you’re a mother.
Three months before everything cracked, Derek asked for my account info “just to set a few things up online,” the way he said it all smooth and helpful, like he was doing me a favor. “I don’t want you missing anything,” he told me. I hesitated long enough to taste the doubt, then handed it over anyway, because trust is a habit when it’s your own kid.
Six weeks later, he came by with his fiancée, Britney. Twenty-six, pretty in a sharp way that made my skin go a little tight. She sat in my living room and didn’t look at me first—she looked at my furniture, my walls, the old clock on the mantel like she was mentally pricing it all. “This place must be worth a lot now,” she said lightly, smiling without warmth. I told her, just as lightly, “It’s my home. I’m not selling.”
Derek laughed like it was a joke. But his eyes didn’t.
The next Sunday, I opened my laptop with my coffee like I always do, expecting the same quiet numbers, the same familiar balance that had taken me decades to build. Instead, my savings—my cushion, my breath, my peace—was suddenly almost gone. One moment it was there, the next it was a hollow space on a screen, and my hands started shaking so hard I had to set the mug down.
I called the bank. The woman on the line sounded kind, young, careful. She pulled up the history, paused, and said, “Mrs. Thornton… these transfers were approved through online access, and they went to an account under Derek Thornton.” She didn’t say “your son” like a weapon, but it landed like one anyway.
I hung up and sat at my kitchen table staring at nothing, trying to make my heart stop racing by force of will.
The next morning, Derek called again—cheerful, excited. “Big news,” he said. “I’m getting married tomorrow. We’re doing it at the Riverside Country Club.” He talked about flowers like nothing had happened, like my life hadn’t just been turned inside out.
When I finally got his attention and said, “Derek… my accounts,” he laughed. Actually laughed. “Yeah, Mom. I needed it. You’ll be fine. And I sold the house too. You’ve got thirty days.”
My stomach dropped so hard it felt like falling. “You sold my house?”
“It’s handled,” he said, breezy. “Paperwork. Don’t start a problem right before my wedding.”
And then he hung up.
For a long minute, I couldn’t move. Then something colder than panic slid into place inside me, steadying my hands. I stood up, walked to the hallway cabinet I’d kept locked for years, and pulled the key from the little dish Derek never noticed. The drawer opened with a soft scrape, like it had been waiting.
Inside was a folder—thick, neat, undeniable.
I flipped it open, and the first page made my lips curve into that same laugh I’d given him on the phone, only this time it wasn’t shock.
It was certainty.
Because the address on that page… wasn’t the address Derek thought he’d just taken from me.
Full in the first c0mment

Axel Cuvier

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