I showed up to Christmas dinner on a cast, still limping from when my daughter-in-law had shoved me days earlier. My son just laughed and said, “She taught you a lesson—you had it coming.” Then the doorbell rang. I smiled, opened it, and said, “Come in, officer.”

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.

Reading Melanie’s Playbook

The next day, while they were out, I searched their room. I didn’t care about boundaries anymore.

In a drawer, I found copies of my old will leaving everything to Jeffrey, plus handwritten notes calculating the value of the house and bakeries. There were screenshots from a group chat called “Plan S,” where Melanie and her friends traded tips on controlling elderly relatives.

Most disturbing was a notebook—her manipulation diary. In it she’d written lines like:Continue reading…