From the hallway, a soft vroom-vroom sound drifted in. I turned my head to see Noah, the housekeeper’s six-year-old son, pushing a battered yellow plastic truck across the hardwood floor. He was a quiet, ghostly little boy with wide, observant eyes who often played in the shadows while his mother scrubbed the floors. He stopped near the doorway, watching us. Victoria waved a hand dismissively, as if shooing a fly.
“Tell the help to keep that child out of sight,” she snapped. “This is a dining room, not a nursery.”
I looked at Noah, forcing a small, sad smile. He blinked, clutching his truck to his chest, and scurried away. I envied him. He could leave.
Dinner ended in a glacial silence. As I cleared the plates—because Victoria had dismissed the staff early to “test my dedication”—I felt the walls closing in. I didn’t know it then, but the suffocation I felt that night was merely the calm before the hurricane.
The Accusation
The transition from “wife” to “criminal” took less than twenty minutes.
