He looked away.
Mrs.
Higgins answered for him.
“The apartment has appreciated.
You would still have plenty.”
I stared at her.
She truly believed that taking only part of my home made the theft reasonable.
The hospital’s legal officer joined the call fifteen minutes later.
She confirmed that Dr.
Ortega had been deceased for nearly a year and that no physician at Pine Valley Hospital had evaluated me for a psychological condition.
Nina Vale was not a doctor, nurse, or notary employed by the hospital.
She was a temporary records clerk whose contract had ended three days earlier.
She was also Mrs.
Higgins’s cousin.
Hospital access logs showed that Nina had opened my father’s electronic file nine times without a documented work reason.
She had downloaded a blank letter template bearing the hospital’s logo and viewed scanned examples of physicians’ signatures.
The legal officer said the hospital was already contacting its security department and the police.
Thomas lowered himself onto the sofa.
For the first time since arriving, he no longer looked angry.
He looked frightened.
Mrs.
Higgins did not comfort him.
She pointed at him instead.
“This was his idea.”
Thomas stared at her.
“You introduced me to Nina.”
“You said Alice would never notice the loan.”
“You said the doctor’s letter could not be traced.”
“You filled out the guardianship forms.”
Their alliance collapsed in less than a minute.
Each sentence exposed another part of the scheme.
Daniel’s phone was recording the room.
He had announced that fact before turning it on, and neither of them had stopped talking.
When two Oakwood police officers arrived, Thomas attempted to return to the language of marital disagreement.
He said I had abandoned the apartment.
He said he believed marriage gave him an ownership interest.
He said the documents had been prepared only to simplify household finances.
The officers did not arrest anyone immediately.
They separated us, photographed the apartment, collected copies of the folder, and took statements from Daniel and Marcus.
Because Thomas was my husband and had previously lived in the apartment, the officers explained that his presence involved questions that might require a court order.
The forged documents were different.
The detective assigned to financial crimes instructed Thomas and Mrs.
Higgins not to remove, destroy, or alter any records.
Nina was located later that evening and questioned at Pine Valley Hospital.
I spent that night in a hotel.
I could not bear to sleep in the bedroom Mrs.
Higgins had occupied, and Lena did not want me alone with Thomas while the guardianship hearing was still pending.
At midnight, Daniel sent me the preserved security footage.
It showed Thomas allowing Mrs.
Higgins into the building four days after I left for Pine Valley.
Over the next several weeks, they carried in boxes, furniture, clothes, and household decorations.
They carried my belongings out in black bags and placed several boxes in a storage room under Mrs.
Higgins’s name.
The footage also showed Nina visiting three times.
On her final visit, she arrived with a man named Jordan Bell, an old college friend of Thomas’s whose notary commission had expired the previous year.
