Chapter 8 - THE WIFE BURIED UNDER ANOTHER NAME.
Victor’s wife, Margaret, had supposedly died five years earlier in a boating accident.
Camille was her daughter from a previous marriage. Julian claimed Margaret contacted him secretly and warned that Victor planned to dissolve the family foundation before exposing Briarwood.
Camille called him a liar.
Then Nurse Denise Carter arrived from Briarwood with a sealed affidavit. Margaret was alive, conscious and living there under the name Ruth Ellis.
The dead housekeeper’s identity had been placed over Margaret’s records, while the real Ruth’s eviction and death were treated as clerical errors.
Victor’s voice broke.
“You let me bury an empty coffin.”
Denise admitted helping preserve records but remaining silent after administrators threatened her immigrant coworkers’ jobs.
Elena answered, “Fear explains silence. It does not return five years to him.”
Margaret appeared by secure video. She said she had entered Briarwood voluntarily to investigate but was later drugged and trapped under the false identity.
Then she looked at Elena.
“Your mother did not lose her house because she challenged them.”
May you like
Elena waited.
“She lost it because she helped me disappear.”
