Chapter 2 - Behind Closed Doors
Dinner that night was a masterclass in deception. Vanessa had ordered takeout from my favorite Italian restaurant, plating it meticulously on our fine china to create the illusion of a warm, welcoming home. She poured me a generous glass of red wine, her eyes brimming with manufactured sympathy as she recounted her fabricated struggles.
"I had to take over her finances, Ethan," Vanessa said, slicing her chicken. "She was writing checks to imaginary charities. The bank called me, concerned. I had no choice but to file for power of attorney."
I chewed my food slowly, nodding in apparent understanding. "That must have been a lot of paperwork. I appreciate you protecting her assets."
"It's not about the money," she said quickly, perhaps a little too quickly. "It's about making sure she's safe. But memory care facilities are expensive. Dr. Keller mentioned a private wing at Oakridge Manor. If we sell her house downtown, it should cover the first few years."
Ah. There it was. The motive, laid out as plainly as the napkins on the table. My mother owned a prime piece of real estate in the city center, completely paid off, worth nearly a million dollars. With me out of the country and my mother declared legally incompetent, Vanessa would have full control over the sale and the liquid assets.
"Whatever it takes," I said smoothly, taking a sip of wine. "We'll follow Dr. Keller's recommendation tomorrow."
By 11:00 PM, Vanessa was asleep, heavily sedated by the glass of wine I had generously topped up throughout the evening. I lay in bed next to her, staring at the ceiling, waiting until her breathing deepened into a rhythmic, unbreakable snore.
Moving with practiced silence, I slipped out of bed. I bypassed the creaky floorboard near the door and made my way to my home office. The room was mostly how I left it, but Vanessa had moved some files around. I booted up my encrypted laptop.
I needed to know exactly what was happening in that house while I was thousands of miles away. I needed undeniable, bulletproof evidence. Because in the eyes of the law, a wife’s word and a doctor’s preliminary diagnosis would outweigh the claims of an allegedly confused old woman and a husband who hadn't been present.
I pulled out a small black case from my duffel bag—a network analyzer I used in the field. I plugged it into our home router. It took me less than three minutes to bypass Vanessa's rudimentary passwords and access the local network traffic.
There were three hidden IP cameras running on the Wi-Fi. One in the living room, one in the kitchen, and the one I had spotted in my mother's bedroom. Vanessa was uploading the footage to a secure cloud server, but she was also mirroring the data to a local external hard drive plugged into the back of our smart TV.
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I crept into the living room, retrieved the hard drive, and brought it back to my office.
My hands shook with suppressed fury as I began decrypting the video files. I am a man trained to maintain my composure under artillery fire, but what I saw on that screen tested the absolute limits of my self-control.
