After four years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit, I finally came home. But my key didn’t work. The woman who opened the door was a frail, terrified stranger. It turned out my fiancée had sold my house to her scumbag son, who then used it to dump his own mother after stealing her fortune. We were two abandoned souls, and we became a family. Then, on her deathbed, she gave me one final, mysterious mission…

That day, I learned that while I was inside, my fiancée Marina had come to visit me exactly once. She’d had me sign some papers—”just to manage the property,” she’d said—and then she’d vanished. Turns out, she sold my house for pennies to some scumbag named Alex and disappeared.

And Alex? He was Agnes’s son.

Over the next few weeks, as I slept on the lumpy sofa and Agnes insisted on sharing her meager meals, she told me how she ended up in my house. Her story made my own troubles feel small.

It had been her 85th birthday. Alone in her grand mansion in the city, she’d cooked a feast, hoping her only son, Alex, would come. He did, but not to celebrate. He came to tell her he’d sold her home out from under her to pay off his gambling debts. He packed a single suitcase for her, drove her two hours out into the middle of nowhere, and dumped her in the cheapest, most dilapidated shack he could find—my house. Then he left.