My Daughter-in-Law Is Trying to Teach Me Lessons? In My Own House That I Paid For? I Told My Son.

“You were married before? You never told me.”

“It was a long time ago,”

Victoria said quickly.

“It has nothing to do with us.”

“It has everything to do with it,”

I said.

“Because what you did to that man is the same thing you are trying to do to us.”

Ryan stepped forward.

“That man was my father, and she destroyed him.”

Lucas looked at him, confused, scared.

“Who are you?”

“I am Ryan Gails, Arthur Gails’s son, and I came to tell you what this woman did to my family.”

Ryan started talking. He told the whole story: how Victoria had met his father, how she had married him quickly, how she had isolated him from his family.

How she had managed to get a doctor to declare him incompetent, how she had sold his house, how she had put him in a horrible nursing home, how he had died alone. With every word, Lucas became paler.

Victoria tried to interrupt to deny it, but Ryan had documents, evidence, photos, everything.

“That is not true!”

Shouted Victoria finally.

“This man is lying! He is crazy! I do not know who hired him to say these things!”

“But I have the marriage certificates,”

Said Benjamin.

“I have the house sale deed, I have the nursing home records. I have everything, Victoria. You cannot deny it.”

I took more papers out of another folder.

“And there is more, Lucas. Arthur was not the only one. We found at least two other cases. Two other older men, widowers with properties.”

“Victoria married them and in both cases they ended up losing everything.”

“No… no…”

Lucas got up from the sofa.

“This cannot be true. Victoria, tell me it is not true!”

Victoria also stood up. She had tears in her eyes, but I knew they were fake.

“Lucas, my love, you have to believe me! These people are trying to separate us!”

“Your mother has never accepted me. She hired these people to invent lies about me!”

“I did not hire her,”

I said firmly.

“Benjamin came on his own because he has a conscience, because he did not want to be an accomplice to what you were planning.”

I took out the last document, the most important one.

“And I also found this. A request you made two weeks ago to the Department of Social Services, asking them to evaluate my mental health, saying that I represented a danger to myself, that I needed supervision.”

Lucas took the paper. He read it; his hands were shaking.

“Victoria… did you do this?”

“It was for her own good, Lucas! Your mom is alone, she is depressed, she needs professional help!”

“I am perfectly fine!”

My voice came out louder than I expected.

“I am not sick. I am not crazy. What is happening is that you wanted them to declare me incompetent so you could take my house, to do to me the same thing you did to Arthur, to the others.”

“That was your plan from the beginning.”

Lucas dropped the paper. He put his hands to his head.

“I cannot believe this. I can’t.”

Benjamin spoke with a calm voice.

“Lucas, your wife is a professional con artist. This is what she does. She looks for vulnerable men, men who have just lost someone.”

“She seduces them, she marries them fast, and then she starts the process of isolating them from their families and keeping their properties.”

“That is a lie!”

Shouted Victoria.

“It is all a lie!”

“Then explain the previous marriages,”

I said.

“Explain the documents. Explain why you hired a lawyer to investigate how to take my house. Explain why you wanted them to declare me incompetent.”

Victoria looked at me with pure hatred. There were no more smiles; there was no more falseness, only rage.

“You,”

She whispered.

“You ruined everything. It could have been easy. You could have accepted our help, but you had to be difficult. You had to investigate.”

She turned to Lucas.

“Tell these people to leave now!”

But Lucas did not move. He was in shock, looking at Victoria as if she were a stranger.

“Is it true? Everything they are saying… is it true?”

Victoria opened her mouth. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, something had changed.

She was no longer the sweet wife; she was another person, someone cold, calculating.

“You are an idiot, Lucas. You always were. I thought I could handle you, that you could be useful, but you are as weak as your father.”

Lucas took a step back as if he had been hit.

“What did you say?”

“I never loved you. You never mattered to me. Only this mattered.”

She pointed around.

“This house. This property. $400,000 I calculated, maybe more. And I would have gotten it if your mother had not been so nosy.”

The tears started falling down Lucas’s face. Not of fear; of pain, of betrayal.

“I… I loved you.”

Victoria laughed, a cold laugh, cruel.

“Everyone loves me at the beginning. It is easy to make fools like you fall in love. You do, you say what they want to hear, you make them feel special.”

“And later, when they are already hooked, you start taking control.”

She came closer to me. Benjamin stepped in between, but I stopped him with a gesture.

“You should have accepted my help, Patricia. It would have been easier for everyone. But now, now you are going to have trouble.”

“I am going to sue you. I am going to say you threatened me, that these men attacked me. I am going to make your life impossible.”

“You are not going to do anything,”

Said Benjamin.

“Because I have everything recorded. Every word you just said.”

“And if you try to do anything against Mrs. Miller or against Lucas, I am going to take this to the police. I am going to take all the documents, all the evidence, and I am going to bury you.”

Victoria froze.

“You are lying.”