She had done it to remove the one person in the house who knew me well enough, and cared about me enough, to see what was coming and tell me before it was too late.

Teresa was not collateral damage in Vanessa’s plan.

Teresa was the obstacle the plan was designed to eliminate.

I had spent months thinking Vanessa merely looked down on my housekeeper.

In fact she had identified her, correctly, as the single most dangerous person to her scheme, and had set out to destroy her.

There is something almost mathematical about how a person like Vanessa surveys a household, and it chills me to reconstruct it.

She would have looked at everyone around me and asked, of each, a single question: is this person a threat to what I am planning, and if so, how do I neutralize them?