Six months after they moved in, Jeffrey came to me in the garden, wearing the face he’d used as a child when he wanted something. His company might lay him off, he said. He needed $50,000 for a course that would secure his future.
I wired the money the next day.
The requests kept coming:
– $40,000 for an investment,
– $25,000 for a car accident,
– $30,000 for a “business partnership.”
By December, I’d given them $230,000 without seeing a cent back. Whenever I mentioned repayment, Jeffrey changed the subject. They always approached me alone, always with a crisis that made me feel guilty if I said no.
“When Is the Old Woman Going to Die?”
One quiet Sunday, everything changed. I went downstairs early to make coffee and heard voices from their room. The hallway carried the sound perfectly.
Melanie’s voice asked, in a casual tone, “So when is the old woman going to die?”
My blood went cold.
Jeffrey laughed nervously and told her not to talk like that. She ignored him. She said I was sixty-eight, I could live another twenty or thirty years, and they couldn’t wait that long. They needed “a way to speed things up,” or at least make sure all my assets went straight to them without legal trouble.
Jeffrey muttered that I was his mother. Melanie snapped back, asking how much they’d already taken. He guessed around two hundred thousand. She said they could probably squeeze another hundred out of me before I noticed.
I went back to my room, locked the door, and cried into the pillow I used to share with Richard. That old Sophia—the naive woman who believed blood automatically meant loyalty—died that morning. A new Sophia took her place, one who would never again mistake greed for love.
Discovering the Theft
I kept quiet. I watched. I smiled like nothing had altered. But now I noticed everything: how Melanie hovered when bank mail arrived, how Jeffrey avoided talking about the bakeries, how conversations stopped when I entered a room.
I made an appointment with Robert, our longtime accountant. Under the excuse of a year-end review, I asked him to go through all of my personal and business accounts.
What he found turned my stomach. In addition to the “loans,” there were dozens of unauthorized withdrawals from the bakery accounts—two thousand here, three thousand there—always on days when Jeffrey handled paperwork for me. Over ten months, about $68,000 had been siphoned off using my digital signature.
Altogether, they’d gotten nearly $300,000 out of me.
I asked Robert to revoke Jeffrey’s access to every account and prepare a detailed report of the suspicious transactions. He suggested going to the police. I told him not yet. I wanted a full picture first.
