Chapter 3Keeping The Eight Million For Myself

After lunch, I walked out the door.

At the bottom of the stairs, I ran into Richard and Skye. They weren't even trying to hide it anymore. They were walking up the path, fingers intertwined, looking like a sickeningly sweet couple in a jewelry commercial.

I walked past them as if they were invisible.

"Mrs. Miller!" Skye called out.

She was beaming, that youthful, predatory glow radiating off her. "Are you heading out?"

She leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "You might want to stay out late. I’d hate for you to come home and see something... upsetting. You know, like this."

She pressed her lips to Richard’s in a bold, wet kiss. Richard looked slightly uncomfortable, his eyes darting around to see if any neighbors were watching, but he didn't pull away.

Skye pulled back, a glint of malice in her eyes. "Oh, and Mrs. Miller? Richard said he’s buying me a villa in the hills. Do you even know what a villa looks like? You’ve probably never stepped foot in one."

She winked. "Maybe after the divorce, you can come over and be our cleaning lady. At least then you’d get to see how the other half lives."

I remembered the first day I met Skye. She had seemed so sweet, so harmless. She told me she wanted to go into academia and asked if my husband could tutor her.

By the third week of "tutoring," I had heard her moans through the office door.

"I just love mature men with authority," she had whispered.

In my last life, I fought to keep them apart. This time? I was going to help them find their "happily ever after." After all, I had what I needed.

I hailed a taxi and went straight to a local labor agency. I hired six strong men and drove two hours out to the countryside, to the old farmhouse my parents had left me.

It was overgrown with weeds, abandoned for over a decade. It was the place where I had died in my previous life.

In that life, Natalie had shoved me into the dirt here and laughed. "Guess what, Mom? Dad had eight million dollars stashed away in a private account the whole time. Bribes, 'consulting fees,' cash gifts from students' parents... all of it. He hid the cash in the floorboards of this dump because he knew you’d never look here."

Eight million dollars.

He hadn't touched a cent of it when he was paralyzed. He’d let me work three jobs to pay for his medicine while Natalie spent his pension on designer shoes. And the moment he recovered, he’d dug it up to buy Skye a new life.

He wouldn't even give me ten thousand for my surgery.

Well. This time, I was the one with the shovel.