PART 2
“Mommy put the jewelry in Maya’s bag,” Ethan whispered, his eyes fixed on his mug. “I saw her. Maya was outside setting up the sprinkler for us, and Mommy went into her room. She didn’t know I was looking through the door.”
The kitchen seemed to lose all its warmth. I stared at my six-year-old son, my heart hammering against my ribs. Caleb, sitting next to him, stopped chewing his marshmallow and looked up, tears fresh in his eyes.
“She told us if we said anything, the police would take us away too,” Caleb whimpered, reaching out to grab my forearm. “Daddy, please don’t let Mommy send us away.”
A sickening wave of fury and disgust washed over me. Vivian hadn’t just framed an innocent young woman who had loved and cared for our children for three years; she had actively terrorized our sons into silence to cover her tracks.
I pulled both boys into my arms, holding them tightly against my chest. “Nobody is taking you away,” I promised, my voice thick with emotion. “I swear to you. Daddy is going to fix this.”
I got the boys up to bed, staying with them until their breathing grew heavy and they finally drifted into a restless sleep. Once I was sure they were out, I walked down the long, dimly lit hallway toward my home office. My mind was racing. Why would Vivian do this? Maya was an exceptional nanny. The boys adored her. It made absolutely no sense—unless Maya had seen something she wasn’t supposed to.
I sat at my desk and pulled up the security network for the estate. Vivian controlled the main system, but as the owner of multiple medical facilities, I had a private, encrypted server installed for my own study and the immediate perimeter for data security.
I began reviewing the footage from earlier that afternoon. Sure enough, the camera capturing the hallway outside the staff quarters showed Maya walking out to the garden with the twins. Exactly four minutes later, Vivian appeared. She glanced around the empty hallway, stepped into Maya’s room, and emerged thirty seconds later with empty hands.
But as I continued scrolling through the previous week’s footage, trying to understand the why, I found a clip from three days ago. It was late at night. The camera in the library showed Maya entering to restock the firewood. A moment later, Vivian’s phone, left on the reading table, lit up with a succession of texts. In the video, Maya accidentally glanced at the glowing screen, froze, and then quickly hurried out of the room looking visibly shaken.
I zoomed in on the high-definition feed and paused it on the reflection of the phone screen.
The texts were from an unknown number, discussing a massive siphoning of funds from my medical network’s charitable foundation—millions of dollars routed through an offshore account. And the final text read: “Your husband has no idea. We close the account on Friday.”
