The next morning, I woke before my alarm.
I checked the time.
It wasn't nine yet.
I had more than an hour before the call.
But I couldn't get back to sleep.
I went downstairs.
Dad was already awake.
He was sitting at the dining table with a cup of coffee.
My notebook was beside the laptop.
He looked up when I entered.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
I sat across from him.
For a few minutes, neither of us spoke about Rebecca.
We didn't need to.
The computer was there.
The documents were there.
And we both knew why we'd agreed to speak with a woman neither of us had ever met.
I made another cup of coffee.
Then I opened the evidence folder.
I checked Rebecca's email one more time.
The bank transfer was still there.
Eighteen thousand five hundred dollars.
The amount looked no smaller in the morning.
I thought about how long it would take me to save that much from my salary.
I thought about how carefully I'd protected my own savings.
Then I wondered how Derek had persuaded Rebecca to trust him with such a large sum.
Dad looked at the screen.
“Don't decide what happened before she explains it.”
I nodded.
“I know.”
But I couldn't stop imagining the possibilities.
Maybe Derek had once had a legitimate business.
Maybe he'd made a bad investment.
Maybe the relationship had ended because of something unrelated.
I wanted to hear Rebecca's account before judging him.
At the same time, I couldn't forget what I had seen with my own eyes.
He had taken a crowbar to my back door.
Whatever Rebecca said, that part was real.
At a few minutes before nine, I opened the video call.
Dad moved his chair closer.
I placed the notebook beside the keyboard.
My hands felt cold.
I didn't know what Rebecca looked like beyond the photograph she'd sent.
And that picture had been taken when she was still with Derek.
The woman in it had been smiling.
I wondered whether she regretted that day.
At exactly nine, the call connected.
Rebecca appeared on the screen.
She looked to be in her early thirties.
Her expression was serious.
She seemed nervous.
For a moment, we simply looked at one another.
Then I spoke.
“Rebecca, thank you for agreeing to talk with us.”
She nodded.
“I appreciate you hearing me out.”
I introduced Dad.
She greeted him politely.
He thanked her for contacting me.
Rebecca looked down for a moment.
Then she looked back at the camera.
“I wasn't sure whether Mary would believe anything I said.”
I understood that.
She was Derek's former fiancée.
I was the younger half-sister of the woman he was currently dating.
It would have been easy to dismiss her as someone upset about a failed relationship.
I didn't want to do that.
But I also needed to be careful.
“I haven't decided what to think,” I told her. “I just want to understand.”
Rebecca nodded.
“That makes sense.”
She asked how long Derek had been seeing Carol.
“About six months.”
Her expression changed slightly.
She looked down again.
Then she said that timing sounded familiar.
I glanced at Dad.
He leaned forward.
“Can you explain what you mean?”
Rebecca took a breath.
She said Derek had always been very good at presenting a future.
Not a real business plan she could examine.
A future.
He talked about opportunities that were nearly ready.
He mentioned technology.
Investments.
Business partners.
Projects that supposedly needed only one more step before becoming successful.
I listened.
The words sounded familiar.
Carol had used similar language when describing Derek.
She talked about his work as though he were constantly preparing for something important.
There was always a reason he needed more space.
More time.
More support.
I had assumed he was building a business.
Rebecca said she'd believed the same thing.
When they first began dating, Derek had seemed ambitious.
He spoke confidently.
He made plans.
He told her he had an ownership interest in a software development company.
He described meetings with business partners.
He said money would soon be coming into the company.
Rebecca had believed him.
She had no reason, at first, to think he was lying.
Their relationship became serious.
Eventually, they got engaged.
I watched her face as she said that.
She didn't look angry.
She looked tired.
As if remembering the engagement required her to revisit decisions she wished she'd made differently.
She explained that Derek began asking for financial help during their relationship.
At first, the amounts weren't large.
He always had an explanation.
A payment was delayed.
An expense needed to be covered.
A business opportunity couldn't wait.
Rebecca said he made the requests sound temporary.
He always seemed confident that repayment would be easy.
She wanted to support the man she planned to marry.
So she helped.
Then the requests grew.
The explanations became more complicated.
And eventually, she transferred eighteen thousand five hundred dollars to him.
I looked down at my notebook.
I wrote the amount again.
Dad asked whether there had been a written agreement.
Rebecca nodded.
“Yes. That's the document I sent Mary.”
She explained that the money was supposed to be used for business expenses.
Derek had agreed to repay it within twelve months.
I asked what happened when the money was due.
Rebecca looked directly at me.
“He didn't pay it back.”
She said she'd asked him about repayment several times.
At first, he promised that funds were coming.
Then he became irritated whenever she brought up the loan.
He accused her of not believing in his plans.
He made her feel as though asking for her own money was an insult.
I felt uncomfortable hearing that.
Mom had used similar reasoning with me.
Whenever I objected to helping Carol, the objection became proof that I didn't care about family.
The actual request disappeared.
Only my refusal mattered.
Rebecca continued.
She said Derek became angry when she started asking for documents about his business.
He had spoken so often about his company that she expected it to be easy to verify.
Instead, his explanations kept changing.
He showed her material that seemed to support his claims.
Pictures of offices.
Screenshots of financial accounts.
References to a registered business.
But when she began checking those things, she found problems.
The company registration he relied on was inactive.
The offices in his photographs belonged to other businesses.
And some of the financial images he had used to impress her didn't show what he'd claimed.
I stared at the screen.
I remembered Carol talking about the office Derek needed in my house.
How he couldn't work properly without it.
How important his projects supposedly were.
I wondered whether she'd ever seen real evidence of his business.
I wondered whether she'd asked questions.
Or whether she'd simply believed him because she wanted to.
Dad spoke.
“Did Derek actually own the software company?”
Rebecca hesitated.
“Not in the way he told me.”
She explained that she'd found nothing to support the scale of the business he described.
The registration existed, but it wasn't the thriving operation he'd led her to believe it was.
She had felt embarrassed.
Then angry.
Mostly, she felt deceived.
She had trusted him with money because she believed they were planning a life together.
Instead, she was left with an unpaid loan and explanations that didn't make sense.
I asked whether she had ended the engagement because of those discoveries.
She nodded.
“Yes.”
Her answer was short.
I didn't press her for personal details.
She had already told us enough to explain why she was concerned.
Rebecca said Derek eventually left her life.
He told her he was moving to another state.
He said he wanted a fresh start.
She hadn't expected to hear from him again.
I looked at Dad.
He was writing something in my notebook.
I couldn't see what.
Rebecca continued.
She said that sometime after Derek began seeing Carol, he contacted her.
That surprised me.
I looked back at the screen.
“He contacted you after meeting my sister?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Rebecca paused.
She seemed to be choosing her words carefully.
Then she explained that Derek had started asking about my family.
Not about Carol's feelings.
Not about whether Rebecca thought his new relationship would work.
He wanted information.
He asked about my mother's house.
He asked about Dad's finances.
And he asked whether I owned property.
I felt my stomach tighten.
I looked down at the table.
My coffee had gone cold.
I hadn't touched it in several minutes.
Dad leaned forward.
“Did he explain why he wanted that information?”
Rebecca shook her head.
“Not clearly.”
She said the questions had seemed strange at the time.
Derek hadn't offered a reasonable explanation.
He simply wanted to know what resources might exist in Carol's family.
Rebecca hadn't given him useful information.
But she remembered something he'd said.
He mentioned Carol's younger half-sister.
A woman who worked in technology.
A woman who had recently purchased a home.
I looked up.
That was me.
Derek knew my job.
He knew I'd bought a house.
And he knew Dad had helped me financially.
I felt a tightness in my throat.
It was one thing for Carol to talk about me.
It was another for Derek to ask his former fiancée questions about my finances.
Dad asked whether she'd told Derek anything about the seventy thousand dollars.
Rebecca shook her head.
“No. I didn't know the amount at first.”
I glanced at Dad.
He looked as troubled as I felt.
Rebecca explained that Derek had spoken as though my property could solve several problems.
He described me as financially stable.
He believed I had a good credit history.
He seemed interested in the money that had helped me purchase the home.
But Rebecca said she hadn't understood his purpose immediately.
Only after learning about the attempted move did his earlier questions begin to make sense.
I looked toward the back door.
Derek had tried to force his way through it.
And now I was hearing that he'd been asking questions about me long before that morning.
It wasn't a comforting feeling.
I turned back to Rebecca.
“Did he ever tell you what he planned to do with my house?”
She was quiet.
Then she reached for something outside the camera's view.
She brought a document onto the screen.
“I think you need to see the messages he sent me.”
I felt my hands grow cold again.
Dad moved his chair closer.
Rebecca opened the conversation.
And for the first time, I understood that Derek's interest in my property had never been limited to finding a room for his computer.
Click here to continue reading: PART 7: Rebecca Showed Us Derek’s Messages About My Home, and I Learned He Wanted My Credit and Equity More Than a Place to Live
I Had Barely Settled Into My New Home When My Mother Arrived With a Moving Truck and Expected Me to Hand Over Everything
Part 6 of 15
