Chapter 15 - THE WOMAN BEFORE ME
Her name was Lydia Crane.
She had worked with Marcus at his first financial firm.
Six years earlier, she resigned suddenly and moved across the country.
Public records showed a history of psychiatric treatment beginning shortly after her resignation.
The diagnosis came from Dr. Samuel Keene.
The same psychiatrist who created my false evaluation.
Nina located Lydia in Oregon.
At first, she refused to speak.
Then we sent her a photograph of the Replacement folder.
She called within an hour.
“I knew Eleanor kept records,” she said.
“I never knew she kept that.”
Lydia agreed to a secure video interview.
She was forty-one.
Her voice remained steady, but her hands trembled whenever she mentioned Marcus.
Their affair lasted seven months.
Marcus told her he planned to leave me.
He claimed I abused him financially and emotionally.
The story was nearly identical to the one he told Chloe.
Eleanor contacted Lydia privately.
She offered an apartment, legal support, and a position after the divorce.
Then Marcus ended the relationship without warning.
When Lydia threatened to tell me, photographs appeared showing her entering a psychiatric clinic.
Her employer received anonymous messages questioning her judgment.
Dr. Keene diagnosed her with obsessive delusions after a single consultation.
“I started doubting myself,” Lydia said.
“Everyone around me treated Marcus as calm and respectable.”
“I was the woman having an affair with a married man.”
“No one wanted to hear that he had recruited me into a plan.”
“What was the plan?” Ava asked.
“To make Clara appear unstable and transfer the bakeries.”
The same plan had been attempted six years earlier.
Why had it failed?
Lydia refused to sign the false witness statement.
She also discovered Marcus was sleeping with another woman.
When she confronted Eleanor, Eleanor warned that Lydia would lose everything.
She did.
Her career.
Her apartment.
Her reputation.
She eventually attempted to take her own life.
The admission left the video call silent.
“I survived,” Lydia said.
“But they made survival feel like proof I was broken.”
Ava asked whether she would testify.
Lydia looked away.
“They will destroy me again.”
“They no longer control the narrative,” I said.
“They always control it.”
“No.”
“They controlled mine for ten years.”
“They controlled Chloe’s.”
“They controlled Rose’s.”
“They controlled yours.”
“But every system fails when enough of the people inside it stop lying.”
Lydia studied my face.
“You don’t hate me?”
“I hate what you helped do.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No.”
“It is not.”
She agreed to testify.
Her testimony connected the current conspiracy to a long-standing pattern.
It strengthened the fraud case.
It also revealed that Marcus had begun planning my removal long before Chloe entered the house.
Chloe had been a replacement for Lydia.
And there may have been others.
Dr. Keene was arrested two days later.
Investigators found dozens of evaluations tied to Graham Pike’s clients.
Several involved spouses in high-asset divorces.
Keene had built a business around manufacturing medical credibility for wealthy people seeking control.
He agreed to cooperate.
According to Keene, Eleanor introduced Marcus to the arrangement.
But Marcus expanded it.
He referred business colleagues.
He received referral payments.
My husband had not merely attempted to declare me unstable.
He had profited from doing it to other women.
The prosecutor added racketeering and wire-fraud charges.
Marcus’s disappearance became a national search.
Then he contacted Lydia.
He used an encrypted messaging application and asked her to meet him.
Lydia immediately informed investigators.
Marcus claimed he possessed proof that Eleanor and Graham had ordered the bakery fire.
He said they were preparing to leave the country.
He wanted protection.
The meeting was arranged at a roadside motel.
Police surrounded the location.
Lydia entered wearing a concealed microphone.
Marcus appeared ten minutes later.
He had cut his hair and grown a beard.
He looked exhausted.
He gave Lydia a memory card.
Then he saw the reflection of an officer in the motel window.
Marcus ran.
Police pursued him across the parking lot.
He reached a drainage canal and slipped down the concrete embankment.
Officers pulled him from the water.
He was arrested without serious injury.
The memory card contained recordings of Eleanor and Graham discussing the fire.
It also contained a video Marcus had made for me.
He sat alone in an unknown room.
For three minutes, he described how Eleanor had controlled every major decision in his life.
Then he looked directly into the camera.
“I did love you, Clara,” he said.
“I loved you until your success made me understand how little I was without it.”
The final sentence was not an apology.
It was a confession.
But before the video ended, Marcus revealed one more fact.
May you like
Eleanor and Graham had not fled.
They were hiding somewhere inside my mansion.
