Catherine looked up, and for one fleeting second, a smile lit her face, but it disappeared the moment she saw Victor behind the child.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice rough and empty.
“Catherine, please, I found out everything,” Victor pleaded, stepping closer.
“I know my mother kicked you out, and I know she blocked every single attempt you made to see me.”
Catherine gave a dry, hollow laugh, like dead leaves scraping across pavement.
“Does knowing that now actually change anything, Victor?”
The doctor, Dr. Harvey Reed, stepped in with a solemn expression.
“Mr. Williams, your wife is suffering from advanced kidney failure and requires an immediate transplant to survive.”
The floor seemed to vanish beneath Victor’s feet, leaving him dizzy.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he shouted.
Catherine looked at him with exhausted, hollow eyes.
“Tell you where, Victor?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“The phone number you changed? The office where your security guards laughed at me? Or the mansion where your mother threatened to call the police if I ever set foot on the property again?”
Every sentence struck like broken glass, tearing through every defense he had left.
Victor immediately demanded compatibility tests, refusing to leave Catherine’s side even when she weakly protested.
“This time I am not going anywhere, and you can hate me all you want, but I am going to save you,” he promised.
That night, Victor’s assistant arrived with a mountain of legal documents, revealing the full scale of the fraud.
The monthly transfers had never reached Catherine; every cent had been diverted straight into Maris’s personal offshore accounts.
Worse, doctors discovered that someone had been paying for prescriptions that were actually worsening Catherine’s illness, and the pharmacy billing address led directly back to Maris.
Catherine was completely stunned, unable to comprehend the cruelty of the woman she had once called mother-in-law.
“No, she may have hated me, but she wouldn’t try to kill me,” she whispered, shaking her head.
At dawn, Maris arrived at the hospital, her hair messy and her eyes swollen from crying.
“I didn’t want this to happen, I just thought I was protecting my son!” she cried, collapsing onto the linoleum floor.
Victor stood over her, his shadow stretching large.
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