Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the Window
The next two weeks were a blur of agonizing surgeries, heavy painkillers, and endless meetings with lawyers. Daniel had brought in a former federal prosecutor named Sarah Jenkins to spearhead my case. Sarah was a shark in a tailored pantsuit, and she took one look at my bruised, stitched face and made it her personal mission to destroy my family.
True to Wyatt’s promise, his private investigators descended upon my parents’ lives like a swarm of locusts. While the local police dragged their feet on the assault investigation—partly due to my parents’ aggressive smear campaign painting me as a mentally unstable, jealous daughter—Wyatt’s team dug into the financial records.
I was resting in the penthouse Wyatt had moved us into, an ice pack pressed against the titanium plates now holding my left cheekbone together. The swelling had gone down, but the jagged red scar running through my eyebrow was a permanent reminder of the price of my family’s greed.
Wyatt walked into the bedroom, followed by Sarah and a man in a rumpled suit whom I recognized as Arthur Vance, Wyatt’s lead private investigator.
“We found the ghost in the window,” Arthur said without preamble, dropping a thick manila folder onto the foot of my bed.
I sat up slowly. “Who is he?”
“His name is Elias Davis,” Sarah said, her voice tight with disbelief. “Your father’s older brother. Your uncle Elias.”
I stared at her. “My father doesn't have a brother. He was an only child. My grandparents died when I was six.”
“That’s what he told you,” Wyatt said, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking my hand. “Elias Davis is very real. And he is incredibly wealthy. Or, he was.”
Arthur opened the folder, revealing grainy surveillance photos of the old man I had seen in the window. “Elias made a fortune in commercial real estate in the eighties. He never married, never had kids. Ten years ago, he suffered a mild stroke. Your parents volunteered to be his primary caretakers. They moved him into the secret converted basement of their house—a room you and Melanie were never allowed to go into.”
My stomach dropped. I remembered the heavy padlock on the basement door. My father always told us it was for hazardous chemical storage for his old landscaping business.
“Why hide him?” I asked, horrified.
“Because if anyone knew he was coherent, they couldn't control his estate,” Sarah explained, her eyes flashing with anger. “For the last decade, your parents have been slowly siphoning millions out of Elias’s accounts. They isolated him. They kept him a prisoner in his own mind and in that house. But here is the kicker, Sadie.”
Sarah pulled out a photocopied legal document. It looked ancient, typed on thick, yellowing paper.
“This is Elias’s original will, filed with a very obscure estate lawyer thirty years ago. He left the entirety of his estate—the trusts, the properties, the hidden offshore accounts—to the firstborn child of his brother, Gregory. He wanted the wealth to skip a generation because he knew your father was a degenerate gambler and a fraud.”
I stopped breathing. “I’m the firstborn.”
Wyatt nodded slowly. “Your parents were never trying to get Melanie to marry me just for my money, Sadie. They needed Melanie to marry me because they are completely broke. They drained Elias’s liquid accounts, and they owe millions to private lenders. The bulk of Elias’s wealth is locked in a trust that transfers directly to you the moment you turn twenty-five or get married.”
“I turn twenty-five in two months,” I whispered.
“Exactly,” Sarah said. “They needed Melanie hooked up with a billionaire to pay off their massive debts before the trust executes and the auditors realize the money is gone. When you refused to back down, when Wyatt refused to leave you for Melanie... you became a liability. A liability that was about to inherit the one thing keeping them out of federal prison.”
The brick. The laughter. The setup. It wasn't just a fit of rage. It was a calculated, desperate move by cornered animals. If I were dead, or deemed mentally incompetent, the trust would default to my father as the next of kin.
“They hit me to break me,” I said, my voice trembling with a rage so deep it burned away the last of my fear. “They wanted to have me committed. They told the police I was unhinged.”
“And Elias saw the whole thing from the window,” Wyatt said softly.
I looked at the photos of the frail old man trapped in that house. He was my blood. He was the key.
May you like
“We have to get him out,” I said, looking at Wyatt. “Before they realize we know.”
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