Chapter 3 - The Ghost of the Past
Sleep did not come easily that night.
I lay in my private quarters,
which were larger than the entire apartment I had shared with Miguel in our early years.
The silk sheets felt alien against my skin.
I kept thinking about the ledgers I had hidden under my own mattress.
Every time a floorboard creaked,
I jumped.
Around 2:00 AM,
my phone vibrated on the nightstand.
A message from an unknown number.
“I know you’re there,
Maya.
I know what you’re doing.”
My heart stopped.
I stared at the screen,
breathless.
Was it Ethan?
Chloe?
Or had Ofelia found a way to haunt me even here?
I didn't reply.
I couldn't.
A few minutes later,
the phone rang.
I answered it,
my voice a mere thread.
“Hello?”
“Maya,
it’s Miguel.”
The sound of his voice,
once so familiar,
now felt like a violation.
“How did you get this number?”
I hissed.
“My mother…
she was worried.
She said you left in a state of delusion.
She called your training program and pretended to be your sister.”
Ofelia.
Even in my escape,
she was the architect of my misery.
“What do you want,
Miguel?”
“I want you to come home.
Valerie…
it was a mistake.
She doesn't understand the business the way you do.
The house is a mess.
My mother is upset.”
I almost laughed.
It wasn't that he missed me.
It was that the unpaid servant had left,
and the machinery of his life was grinding to a halt.
“I’m never coming back,”
I said,
each word a stone I was throwing at the glass house of our past.
“I have a job.
A real job.
And I am making more in a month than you give me for groceries in a year.”
“You’re a nurse,
Maya,”
he sneered,
his tone shifting from pleading to condescending in an instant.
“You’re wiping someone’s backside in a wheelchair.
Is that the 'big life' you wanted?
You’ll be back in a week when you realize how hard it is to actually work for a living.”
“Don't call me again,”
I said,
and I hung up.
I sat in the dark,
my hands shaking.
His words stung,
not because they were true,
but because they reminded me of how small I had allowed myself to become.
I looked at the black box Richard had given me.
I wasn't just a nurse.
I was a guardian of a secret that could topple a multi-billion dollar empire.
I realized then that the only way to truly defeat Miguel and Ofelia was to become someone they couldn't even recognize.
I got out of bed and walked to the window,
looking out over the dark expanse of the Winnetka estate.
Below,
near the guest house,
I saw a shadow moving.
It was Chloe,
Richard’s sister-in-law.
She was talking to a man in a dark suit—not Ethan.
They were standing close,
their body language intimate,
conspiratorial.
She handed him a small envelope.
I retreated behind the curtain,
my mind racing.
The betrayal in this house went deeper than I had imagined.
Ethan was trying to steal the company,
but Chloe had secrets of her own.
And caught in the middle was a man who was pretending to be a statue while the vultures circled.
I realized then that my first night was only the beginning of a long,
dangerous game.
And for the first time in my life,
May you like
I wasn't just a spectator.
I was a player.
