Chapter 3 - The Recording
The security app showed my front porch, kitchen entrance, and upstairs hall.
For a second, I couldn’t remember the password.
Julian’s words kept running through my head.
Your daughter has spent her whole life begging somebody to choose her.
Lena knelt beside my chair.
“Look at me. Where did you write it down?”
“Grandma’s birthday. Then the old shop address.”
My fingers finally worked.
The hallway appeared.
An empty stretch of carpet. A table. My mother’s bedroom door.
I dragged the timeline backward.
There I was, walking upstairs.
Then stopping.
Evelyn watched over my shoulder.
“Start before you came home.”
We heard footsteps.
Julian entered the frame carrying a blue folder.
Mom opened the door.
She kissed him before he crossed the threshold.
I made a small sound I didn’t recognize.
Lena reached for the laptop.
“I can do this part.”
“No.”
I kept watching.
The door remained partly open. Their voices carried into the hallway.
The signing plan.
The divorce.
The replacements.
All of it.
When the clip ended, Evelyn didn’t celebrate.
She asked for the original file.
“We preserve it exactly as it is. No edits. No captions. No music.”
Lena nodded.
“I know.”
They downloaded a copy and made a second backup.
Evelyn wrote down the time and asked about the system settings.
I stared at the frozen image.
Mom had been wearing my robe.
A pale blue silk robe I thought had gone missing in the laundry.
That small detail hurt in a way I hadn’t expected.
She had taken my home, my trust, my future husband.
And apparently, she had helped herself to the robe.
My phone vibrated.
MOM: Can’t sleep. Thinking about my baby getting married.
A second message followed.
MOM: You know I only want what’s best for you.
I pushed the phone away.
Lena’s face went hard.
“Don’t answer.”
But Evelyn raised a hand.
“Actually, a normal answer may help. We don’t want them destroying documents before we understand what they’ve done.”
I typed with two fingers.
Love you. See you in the morning.
Then I turned away and threw up in the bathroom.
When I came out, Evelyn was listening to someone on speakerphone.
“No,” a man said. “That wasn’t part of the packet I prepared.”
It was Daniel Cho, the company’s chief financial officer.
“What packet?” I asked.
May you like
He hesitated.
Then he said, “The one Julian told me you had already approved.”
