“I see,” she nodded. “They’re all the same. First, they’re your rock, and then it’s a knife in the back.” She paused, tapping the concrete floor with the tip of a thin cane I hadn’t noticed before. “Want to make him regret it today?”
I looked at her incredulously. What could this poor, seemingly blind old woman offer?
“My personal driver is coming for me now,” the woman said, as if reading my mind. “Pretend you’re my granddaughter. You’ll get in the car, and your husband will regret leaving you next to the wealthiest woman in this city.”
My breath hitched. It sounded like nonsense. At that very moment, a long, black luxury sedan appeared around the bend. It moved slowly, silently, like a predator, and stopped right at the shelter. A man in a sharp suit and gloves got out and opened the rear door.
“Miss Vance, we are ready to depart,” he said with the deepest respect.
Miss Vance. The old woman. She slowly rose, leaning on her cane. “Darius, wait. My granddaughter is riding with us today.” The driver, without a flicker of surprise, simply nodded and looked at me, waiting. I didn’t have time to think. The fear of staying here in the dark was stronger than the fear of the unknown. I stood up and walked toward the car. I slid onto the soft leather seat. The interior smelled of expensive leather and something else—subtly calm and authoritative. The door closed soundlessly, sealing me off from my former life.
The car turned onto a series of private roads and soon we were in front of a towering, solid fence. The gates silently parted, and we drove onto the property. It wasn’t just a house; it was a fortress. A massive home of dark brick, surveillance cameras on every corner, a perfectly manicured lawn, and not a single flower.
“Come in,” the old woman said, pointing her cane toward the living room. I sat on the edge of a stiff sofa. The old woman remained standing in the middle of the room. She stood motionless for several seconds, and then she did what I absolutely did not expect. She removed the dark sunglasses and looked at me. Her eyes were not impaired. They were incredibly vibrant, sharp, and piercing—intelligent, cold, all-seeing eyes.
“My name is Eleanor Vance,” she said in a completely different, authoritative voice. “And you, Naomi Sterling, are thirty-eight years old. You work as an administrator at the steel mill. Your husband’s name is Marcus Sterling. He’s forty-two, a minor official in the city council aiming for higher office. All correct?”
I was paralyzed, only managing a nod.
“That’s good.” Eleanor Vance poured a glass of water and held it out to me. “Drink. You’ll need your strength.” I took the glass with trembling hands. “How do you know all this? And why were you pretending?”
Eleanor Vance smiled faintly. “In this city, I know everything about everyone who matters. And I was pretending because it’s useful. People aren’t afraid of the visually impaired; they say things they’d never say to someone who can see. Today, I got lucky. I saw an interesting performance.” She settled into the armchair opposite me. “Your husband is a parasite—a petty, ambitious, and foolish parasite. He took on enormous debt to build a showy house, and now he decided to get rid of you and your apartment to pay for it. Am I right?”
I nodded again. The apartment. It was my parents’ apartment, the only thing that was truly mine.
“I will help you,” Eleanor Vance stated firmly. “I will give you everything you need: clothing, a phone, the best lawyers. We will get your apartment and your good name back. But it won’t be free.”
“What do you want in return?” I whispered.
“You will owe me. When the time comes, I will ask for a favor in return. But for now, you will do exactly what I tell you. Deal?”
I looked into those hard, unblinking eyes. I knew I was making a deal with a formidable force, but this force was offering me salvation while the husband who had sworn to love me had left me to perish on the roadside.
“Deal,” I said.
At that moment, something clicked in my mind. A memory my brain had blocked. A picture of the last seconds at that bus stop. I remembered Marcus’s car starting, and how, even as I drove off in Eleanor’s sedan, I had cast one last look back. And I saw it. Marcus’s car hadn’t left. It was parked about a hundred yards farther down the road, hidden just around the curve. He hadn’t just driven away. He had stopped. He was watching, making sure I was left alone, helpless. He wanted to savor my humiliation. A cold horror pierced me. This hadn’t been an argument. It was a planned, cold-blooded performance. The realization burned inside me, displacing the tears, and in their place came a cold, ringing rage.
Eleanor Vance watched the change in my expression with undisguised approval. “That’s better,” she said. “Hatred is much better fuel than self-pity. You can travel far on it.”
Eleanor provided everything as promised. After a shower and a change into clean, expensive, yet impersonal clothes, I met her in the living room for dinner. Her lawyer, Mr. Josiah Wells, was already there. He was a man of about fifty with the face of someone who never smiled.
“Naomi Sterling,” he began, his words precise and cold like scalpel cuts. “Based on preliminary information, your husband committed an act that could be qualified as abandonment in a dangerous situation. However, proving malicious intent will be virtually impossible. He will claim you argued and exited the car voluntarily. Forget that. The priority now is your property, specifically the apartment you inherited. It is not subject to division in a divorce. He has no rights to it. But the fact that he took a step like today suggests he is ready to act unconventionally.”
“What should I do?” I asked quietly.
“Now, go home,” Eleanor interjected, handing me a new, boxed smartphone. “This is your new phone. The number is clean. Communication only through this. Consider your old number lost. It has only two numbers saved: Mr. Wells’s and mine. You don’t need anyone else.” She paused. “You think he just threw you out on the highway? That was only the beginning. You must see everything with your own eyes. Feel it. Understand who you are dealing with. Darius will take you.”
Darius drove as smoothly and silently as before. We entered the city, which was sinking into evening twilight. My heart pounded as we approached my block. “I’ll wait here,” Darius said as I got out.
I walked toward the entrance, imagining opening the door with my key, imagining his face when he saw me, strong, calm, ready for war. I went up to my third-floor apartment. I put the key into the keyhole, and it wouldn’t turn. I froze, tried again. The key only went in halfway. I tried the second key for the bottom lock. The same thing. The locks were new. He had changed the locks.
I recoiled from the door as if struck. This was my apartment, the apartment where I grew up. He couldn’t. He had no right. I hit the door hard with my fist. “Marcus, open up! I know you’re in there!” Silence.
My hands instinctively reached for the new phone. I found Mr. Wells’s number. “Mr. Wells, it’s Naomi. He changed the locks.”
“I expected this,” he replied calmly. “Call the sheriff’s department. Tell them that unknown individuals changed the locks on your apartment. Not a word about your husband. Wait for them. I am on my way.”
The wait was agonizing. After twenty minutes, two officers appeared. “This is my apartment,” I tried to explain. “I came home, and my keys don’t work.”
“Do you have documents for the apartment? Your ID?” the older officer asked.
“Everything’s inside,” I replied helplessly.
Just then, the entrance door downstairs slammed, and fast footsteps sounded on the stairs. Marcus appeared on the landing. But he wasn’t alone. Walking beside him, holding his arm, was a young, beautiful woman in an elegant business suit: Tiffany Chambers, the district attorney’s daughter.
“Naomi, there you are,” Marcus said, feigning concern. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Gentlemen, is something wrong? This is my wife. She’s going through a difficult period, a bit unstable.”
Tiffany stood silently beside him, eyeing me with contempt. And then I saw it. Around her neck was a thin gold chain with a small, irregularly shaped pearl—my mother’s pendant, the one valuable piece of jewelry I kept in a box in the bedroom. Tiffany, catching my eye, casually touched the pearl with her fingers, a slight triumphant smile on her lips.
“Your wife claimed she can’t get into the apartment,” the deputy said, his tone already changed.
“Ah, that,” Marcus sighed sympathetically. “Yes, I was forced to change the locks for her own safety. We’re divorcing. Naomi has been having episodes of aggression lately.” He handed a few papers to the police. “This is a copy of the divorce petition and this is a restraining order. She’s forbidden to approach me or this apartment.”
I stared at him, my vision darkening. Divorce. Restraining order. Monstrous, calculated lies. “That’s not true!” I screamed. “He’s lying!”
At that moment, Mr. Wells came up to the landing. “I am Naomi Sterling’s attorney. What is happening here?”
“My client cannot access her own property,” Mr. Wells stated.
“It was her property,” Marcus corrected calmly, his eyes gleaming. He was relishing this.
The older officer looked up from the papers. “Ma’am, I’m afraid you no longer have rights to this apartment. According to this document, you are no longer the owner.” Marcus, with the same mocking smile, handed another sheet to Mr. Wells, who silently passed it to me.
It was a purchase and sale agreement dated two weeks prior. It stated that I, Naomi Sterling, had sold my three-bedroom apartment to my husband, Marcus Sterling, for a symbolic sum of twenty-five thousand dollars. And at the bottom, beneath the text, was my signature—clear, neat, identical to my actual signature, and absolutely, one hundred percent fake.
We spent several hours at the precinct. It was all useless. The police were clearly siding with Marcus, a respectable man with official papers, against a disheveled woman with no documents and a restraining order against her. Finally, in the early morning, they let us go. I left completely shattered.
At Eleanor Vance’s house, I was met with cold reserve. She summoned me only after lunch. “Well, Naomi,” she asked, her gaze assessing. “Did you finish playing the victim? I gave you every opportunity to fight, and what did you do? You allowed yourself to be destroyed.”
“What should I do?” I asked quietly.
“Sue,” Eleanor sneered. “File a claim. It’s long, expensive, and most likely useless. Your husband has everything locked down. You’ll accomplish nothing. But there must be something he didn’t account for. Some small detail, some document that he couldn’t fake. Something that will prove your undeniable right to that apartment.”
I closed my eyes, trying to focus. And suddenly, an image flashed into my mind: the old blue folder. My father kept all the most important documents in it—the original privatization agreement for the apartment and the certificate of inheritance. The originals, with live signatures and seals. Marcus couldn’t fake those.
“I have it,” I said, opening my eyes. “The originals. At our old family cabin in Willow Creek. My father always kept the most important papers there.”
“Good,” Eleanor nodded. “This is a chance. But we must act quickly and quietly. No one must know you’re going there.”
That very night, I set out. Darius drove me to the outskirts of the settlement. “You have two hours,” he said. “If you don’t show, I leave.”
I walked through the dark, deserted streets. Our cabin stood on the edge of the woods. I had to climb over the leaning fence, scraping my arm. The house door was locked, but a window facing the garden gave way. I climbed inside, inhaling the stale, dusty air. The folder should be in my father’s study, in the bottom drawer of his desk. I pulled out the heavy drawer. Inside, under a stack of old newspapers, lay the blue folder. With trembling hands, I opened it. Everything was there. The certificate of inheritance, the privatization agreement. I had won.
As I stood up, my foot landed on a floorboard that gave a strange crunch. I shone the flashlight down. The floorboard was unsecured. Curiosity won out. I lifted it. Beneath it was a small hiding place, and in the hiding place, a small, fireproof safe. I didn’t know what to think. My father had never mentioned a safe. I tried a few combinations. Finally, the year of my parents’ wedding: 1975. The safe opened.
Inside, there was no money, no gold. Inside lay two neat stacks of papers and two foreign passports. One photo was Marcus. The other was Tiffany. They were planning to run away. I put the passports aside and took the top stack of papers. They were permits, licenses, technical plans for the construction of a new shopping complex—the very project Marcus was obsessed with. And then I got to the last sheet: the main permit for the start of construction. And in the field for the responsible person was a signature—my signature, or rather, my digital copy, the one I used at work. The signature was certified with the seal of my department.
The blood drained from my face. This wasn’t just an escape plan. This was a monstrous setup. Marcus wasn’t just stealing my apartment. He was pinning a massive, multi-million-dollar fraud scheme on me. If this were exposed, all threads would lead to me. He would get the money, leave the country, and I would be sent to prison for years.