Chapter 5 - Lenora Had Applied to Work for Me on Purpose
Lenora did not find me accidentally.
She admitted that later.
She had followed my life from a distance for years.
Not obsessively every day.
But enough.
She knew when my father died.
Knew when I moved to the suburbs.
Knew when Vanessa was born.
Then, eight months earlier, she saw a household staffing post placed through a private agency.
My name was attached.
She applied under her married surname.
Her background check was clean.
Her references were real.
I had not seen her since I was fifteen.
She had been eighteen then.
Now she was forty-two.
Different hair.
Different posture.
Different surname.
I never made the connection.
She told investigators that originally she wanted only one thing:
To see whether I remembered.
I didn’t.
That hurt her more than she expected.
The event that divided her life into before and after had become so unimportant to me that I didn’t even recognize the other person who lived through it.
Then she met Vanessa.
My daughter adored her.
That should have softened Lenora.
At first, it did.
Then resentment twisted it.
Lenora later said every time Vanessa ran toward me laughing, she remembered herself at eighteen watching her mother cry in a motel room.
Every time I came home and hugged my daughter, she thought:
He got to grow up safe after helping destroy us.
Instead of confronting me—
she began taking that anger out on the one person who had absolutely nothing to do with what happened.
May you like
Vanessa.
---
Related Stories
