A Quiet Life Before the Storm

For years, my world had been simple: coffee on the back patio, desert mornings, the ticking of my kitchen clock. My name is Leonard Hayes, retired tax advisor. Numbers had been my entire life. They made sense, stayed honest, never betrayed me.

Eight months before that flight, Mark and Sabrina moved in with me.
Mark had lost his job. His shoulders slumped when he told me, and I opened my door without hesitation. He was my only child. Helping him felt as natural as breathing.

But soon, the son I recognized—who used to call every Sunday—began to fade. Quiet dinners. Closed doors. Whispered calls.

Sabrina, in contrast, took root in my house with surprising ease.
She managed the groceries. Then the organization. Then the mail.
Then the bills.

“Let me help, Leonard,” she would say, all gentle smiles and polished tone.

One evening, as a retirement-planning commercial played on TV, Sabrina said casually:

“Your life insurance is around six hundred fifty thousand, right?”

I hadn’t told her that number.
Something inside me tightened.

But I brushed it off as a coincidence—a mistake I now see as the first slip in a very long unraveling.