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FIFTY-THREE

NINA

When I hired that private investigator to dig into Wilhelmina Calloway’s past, I found some very interesting information.

I had assumed Millie went to jail for some sort of drug crime or maybe theft. But no. Millie Calloway went to jail for something entirely different. She was in prison for murder.

She was only sixteen years old at the time of her arrest and was in prison by seventeen, so it took some effort for the detective to get all the information. Millie was in boarding school. No, not just a boarding school. A school specifically for teenagers with disciplinary problems.

One night, Millie and one of her girlfriends snuck out to a party at the boys’ dormitory. Millie was passing by a bedroom and heard her friend screaming for help behind the door. She entered the dark room and found one of their classmates—a two-hundred-pound football player—forcing himself on her friend.

So Millie picked up a paperweight from on top of a desk and bashed the boy in the head with it. Multiple times. The boy was dead before he even got to the hospital.

The detective had photographs. Millie’s attorney argued that she had been trying to defend her friend, who was being assaulted. But if you look at those photographs, it would be hard to argue she hadn’t meant to kill him. His skull was visibly crushed.

She eventually pleaded guilty to lesser manslaughter charges, given her age and the circumstances. The family of the boy was in agreement—they wanted vengeance for their son’s death, but they also didn’t want him branded a rapist all over the internet.

Millie took the deal because there were other incidents. Things that would have come to light if she had gone to trial.

In grade school, she was expelled when she got into a fight with a little boy in her class who was calling her names—she shoved him off the monkey bars and broke his arm.

In middle school, she slashed the tires of her math teacher’s car when he gave her a failing grade. Soon after that, she was sent to boarding school.

And then even after her prison sentence, the incidents continued. Millie wasn’t laid off from her waitressing job. She was fired after she smashed her fist into the nose of one of her coworkers.

Millie seems like a sweet girl. That’s what Andrew sees when he looks at her. He won’t dig into her past the way I did. He doesn’t know what she’s capable of.

And here’s the truth:

I initially wanted to hire a maid in hopes that she would become my replacement—that if Andrew fell in love with another woman, he would finally let me go. But that’s not why I hired Millie. That’s not why I gave her a copy of the key to the room. And that’s not why I left a bottle of pepper spray in the blue bucket in the closet.

I hired her to kill him.

She just doesn’t know it.