Page 9 of Vengeful Seduction
Kaye
I’m not sure whether I was entirely aware of what was happening in my life for a couple of days after the meeting.
The next day, I went back to work. From the details I had been given about Theodore’s estate, I knew I would never have to work again. At least, I knew it logically, though I was learning from first-hand experience that you can know something in your head and not in your heart.
I’d always had to work, like most people did, just to pay the rent and make sure I could continue to eat. The fact that I could just stop wasn’t something that really resonated with me
What would Theodore want? For me to sit around and live idly off of the inheritance? No way. I knew the man well enough to know he would never want something like that for me. Not in a million years. Theodore himself had only ever been idle when extreme illness had enforced it.
So I went back to work, and I didn’t tell anyone about all of the money I suddenly had, or was going to have when everything cleared. I took care of people, because that was my job, and more than that, because it was my passion.
I was a nurse. No matter what happened to me and no matter where my life took me, I would nurse people. I could have ten dollars to my name, or I could (somehow, in a way that didn’t even really fully make sense to me yet) be worth slightly over 100 billion dollars, but I would always be who I was.
I knew one thing for certain. I didn’t want this money to change me. As I started to come to terms with the money, I poked cautiously around for charities. Keeping that much money for myself wasn’t something that I could even fathom.
I couldn’t spend it in my entire lifetime, especially because part of it was in properties. I would never have to worry about having a place to live, and paying rent, as strange as it seemed, was something I didn’t have to do anymore.
Yes, definitely charities. The problem I ran into was there just wasn’t enough money to donate a decent amount to all of the worthy ones out there. It was all a little bit overwhelming.
Not only that, but there was the strangest feeling of guilt over even having this indecent amount of money. I owned properties I had never seen. The numbers, locations, and place names had started to blur as the lawyer had listed them all. In the end, it had sort of sounded like he was speaking Martian or something.
Part of it was the look I’d glimpsed on David Black’s face just before he stormed out. That money was his, wasn’t it? At least, David had clearly assumed so. Did he need it? I really knew very little about the man.
He’d been so angry. Part of me couldn’t blame him. As the only family Theodore had left, surely he had been expecting the lion’s share of the estate, if not all of it. It was hard not to feel a little bit sorry for him.
It was made a bit easier when I remembered the bleakness in Theodore’s eyes when David hadn’t picked up the phone. I couldn’t imagine ignoring someone like that, even though I had realized David had no real way of knowing his grandfather was dying.
Still, that didn’t do much, if anything, to excuse him. Not to my way of thinking. His grandfather had reached out to him, and I knew the day that I’d dialed the phone for him hadn’t been the first time.
How many times had Theodore reached out to David, and how many times had David rejected him without a word? I didn’t know the whole story, but I couldn’t imagine what Theodore could have done to deserve that.
Nobody deserved to be left completely alone.
Nobody.
To say I was conflicted about David Black would be a definite understatement. It was a strange situation—to feel angry at someone for betraying someone I cared about and at the same time to feel sorry for them too.
David was so angry at me, too. The disdain and the fury with which he had looked at me would haunt me if I let it. I barely knew the guy, and normally I would probably be able to brush off his opinion of me with very little difficulty.
Somehow, with David, it was more difficult.
It seemed easier to just dive into my work. It would take time for everything to clear, and there was no law that said I had to decide what to do right this second. Or even ever. I could take my time.
One thing I didn’t do, though, was let them assign me to work one-on-one with another patient. Not full-time. Theodore’s passing had broken my heart, and I wasn’t sure I could take it if something like that happened again.
I worked until I couldn’t anymore. Any overtime offered, I took, and when I fell into bed, it was because I was too exhausted to keep my eyes open for even another second.
Until one night, about a week after I got the news, I found that I couldn’t sleep, despite having worked my full shift and then some. I lay in bed, too tired to toss and turn, but my eyes simply wouldn’t remain shut.
It wasn’t right. I had all of this money and I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Why had Theodore left it all to me? The houses, the car, the investments—it was all mine and all I had ever done was my job.
Slowly, during that long night, I worked things through in my head a little bit. I had worked hard my whole life and had put myself through nursing school. I didn’t need this money. I had been doing just fine on my own.
Still, it would be nice to not have to worry about money. I could comfortably do that on a quarter of what I had been given. My needs were not all that great.
It was about two o’clock in the morning, and I was so tired my bones ached. My brain hopped around, barely letting me think coherently about anything at all, or so I would have thought.
Suddenly, though, it hit me. I knew what I needed to do. The only thing I could ethically do, if only I could figure out how to make it work.
