After the Shooting, My Fiancée Stopped Even Entering My Room, but One Caregiver Said Something and the Smile Disappeared from Her Face

That morning my fiancée told me directly that my rehabilitation was no longer worth it, then turned to the mirror and applied dark red lipstick to her lips.

The bullet fired six months earlier had shattered my twelfth vertebra. Since then I could not feel my legs, while my body every day increasingly resembled an object that was simply kept in the house. Doctors called it paralysis. I called it a tomb.

Earlier, men in my house fell silent when they heard my name. Maritime routes, construction contracts, union money—many things changed only because I wanted them to. Now almost no one opened the door to my room.

Aria looked at her own eyes in the mirror, not at me.

“Dominic called again,” she said. “He needs a signature for the harbor property.”

“Let him bring the documents here.”

“He does not want to come upstairs.”

“Why?”

Aria shrugged.

“The boys no longer know how to behave with you. They feel awkward.”

“They feel awkward.” Those words fell more heavily in the room than the bullet.

She was wearing the five-carat diamond that I had bought her. We were supposed to get married in three months. But she no longer looked at my face, and certainly not at my legs.

“I am paralyzed,” I told her. “I have not lost my mind.”

Aria tied her robe.

“I have a dress fitting at noon. Have the staff bring lunch.”

She walked toward the door.

“No kiss?” I asked.

She stopped for a moment, but did not turn around.

“Do not make my morning harder, Vincent.”

Then she left.

It was ten in the morning. The small copper pendulum of the clock standing by the window was making a strange noise. With each of its swings I felt my life becoming smaller.

Twenty minutes later the door opened again.

Tessa entered—the house caregiver, wearing a dark blue uniform, her hair carelessly tied back. Dark circles of exhaustion showed beneath her eyes. A small copper key hung around her neck, with a worn wooden bead attached to it.

“Good morning, Mr. Corvino.”

I did not answer.

She was not frightened. Nor did she speak to me unusually slowly, as if the bullet had also damaged my brain.

She placed warm water, towels, and medicines beside the bed.

“The left ankle is swollen,” she said. “We will raise it after the bath.”

“Why do you work here?”

“It is Tuesday. I work on Tuesdays.”

“I asked you something else.”

Tessa looked directly at me.

“They pay me twenty-five dollars an hour. The agency keeps ten. I have rent, and my sister needs money for treatment. That is why I am here.”

It was the first honest answer I had heard in months.

“Twenty-five dollars is not enough.”

“But it is more than minimum wage. Now lean forward.”

I gripped the metal handle. My hands trembled as I lifted my body. Tessa placed a warm towel on my back. Her hands were careful, but not pitying. For the first time since the shooting, I no longer felt like broken furniture.

I was a human being.

Then Tessa said quietly:

“Your fiancée told the staff not to carry out therapy this afternoon.”

My hands froze on the handle.

“What did she say?”

“She said it no longer made sense.”

At that same moment I heard confused sounds from the corridor. Someone’s quick footsteps, then a heavy object falling onto the floor. Tessa turned her head toward the door.

“Vincent, I went into your office this morning to look for the list of medicines, and I found something there.”

“What?”

She grasped the small key hanging around her neck.

“Something no house helper should have found.”

The door handle slowly went down. Tessa pulled a thin black folder from beneath the bed and looked toward the lock. From outside Aria called:

“Tessa, open the door!”

Tessa placed the folder on my knees, put her fingers on the lock, and whispered:

“Before they come in, you must find out what is inside…”

Tessa slid the key into the lock, but the door immediately shook.

“Open up!” Aria shouted. “This room is not yours!”

“Now it is mine too,” Tessa answered calmly.

The lock opened. Inside the folder were several sheets of paper, a small memory card, and a power of attorney drawn up with my signature.

My heart began racing as if I still had legs and could run away.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“In your office, behind a double wall. Dominic came out of there yesterday and locked the door. When I touched the wall while cleaning the floor, the sound changed.”

The door shook again.

“Open it, or I will bring security!” Aria shouted.

Tessa pressed the memory card into my hand.

“There is a recording here. I listened only to the first minute.”

“Whose voice is it?”

Tessa leaned toward me.

“Your fiancée’s. And Dominic’s.”

The door opened. Aria stood on the threshold, anger written across her face.

“Give me that folder.”

“No,” I said.

My voice stopped them both.

Aria entered the room.

“You have no idea what you are doing.”

“I am just about to find out.”

Tessa turned the papers and stopped at one of them. Her face suddenly went pale.

“Vincent, it says here that your signature has already been used. But this document did not yet exist on the day on which it is dated.”

Aria looked at my wheelchair for the first time, then at Tessa, and finally at the small photograph placed in the folder.

“Who is in the photograph?” I asked.

Tessa took out the photograph. On the back it said: “Warehouse 14, two o’clock at night.”

And before the photograph reached me, the telephone rang. A hospital number appeared on the screen. Tessa answered, listened for several seconds, and then slowly lowered the phone.

“Vincent, the doctor said that the security guard who worked with you that night found the missing camera recording…”

At Tessa’s last words, such silence fell over the room that we could hear every tick of the wall clock.

“Where is the recording?” I asked.

“At the clinic,” she answered. “Security told me they could not give it to the police until you yourself requested it.”

Aria took out her phone.

“You will not call anyone, Vincent.”

“Why?”

“Because all of this is nonsense.”

“Then why are you afraid?”

Her finger stopped on the screen. For the first time in six months I saw that my fiancée’s face was not merely cold. She was frightened.

Tessa closed the door and dialed the clinic’s number. Half an hour later my lawyer, Ilia Moretti, entered my room. He was holding a small protective case. Rainwater dripped from his boots onto the floor.

“Vincent, this is the camera card,” he said. “Before I turn it on, you should know: the recording may also be used against you.”

“Turn it on.”

“Not yet,” Aria shouted. “This is illegally obtained material.”

Ilia turned to her.

“You are no longer a lawyer.”

“I am his fiancée!”

“Then you should have known that forging a power of attorney is a crime.”

Aria took one step back.

Ilia inserted the card into the device. An empty warehouse corridor appeared on the screen. The time read two seventeen at night. Then Dominic entered the frame. Aria stood behind him.

“The gun was only for intimidation,” Dominic was saying. “He was not supposed to be killed.”

“If the bullet hits him, we will have no hope of survival,” Aria answered.

“What if he does not die?”

Aria lowered her head.

“Then he still will not be able to sign his own papers. The doctors said he will not feel anything below the waist anymore.”

No one made a sound in my room.

In the recording Dominic placed a sample of my signature on the table.

“In six months the company will be ours.”

“Six months is too long,” Aria said. “I can no longer live with a man who cannot get out of bed.”

The screen went black.

Tessa covered her face with her hand. Ilia lowered his head. And Aria seemed to hear her own words for the first time.

“This is not the whole recording,” she said quietly.

“I know,” I answered.

Ilia took a second sheet of paper from the protective case.

“The clinic sent one more thing. When removing the bullet, the surgeons discovered that the barrel of the weapon belonged to the same series as one registered in Dominic’s name.”

Aria turned toward the door.

“Dominic told me the weapon had been destroyed.”

“Now you know that he has said many things,” Ilia said.

The telephone rang again. This time the number was unknown. I answered.

“Mr. Corvino?” I heard a hoarse male voice. “I am the security guard who found the recording. But that is not all that was happening in your house. Your financial director is about to flee the country right now. And he knows that the second copy is not with me…”

The line went dead.

Ilia stood up.

“Where is the second copy?”

Tessa looked at me slowly.

“Probably where no one is looking for it.”

From below in the corridor came the sound of a car engine. Then someone shouted over security’s radio that the rear gate had opened.

And I realized that the appearance of the recording was not the end, but only the first door. The bullet that entered the house that night might not have been fired on the orders of only one person…

And Dominic still had not heard the worst news…