I took out my phone and opened an app.
“A micro-camera feed. Button size. Streams live to my phone.”
Leticia’s eyes lit with old admiration.
“You really never lost your edge.”
“I just stopped needing it every day.”
We planned for hours.
I would call Adrien and say Matthew needed to pick up school clothes and books. Leticia would wait nearby in a car. I would watch the live feed. If Matthew saw the candle holder or anything else, he would photograph it, not touch it. No accusation. No confrontation unless Vanessa forced one.
The risk was obvious.
If she suspected, she could hurt him again.
Matthew read that fear in my face.
“I want to do this,” he said. “Not just for me. For Paul. For everyone she ever hurt.”
I looked at him and saw it for the first time clearly.
Not a frightened child.
A brave young man.
“All right,” I said. “But you follow the plan exactly. If anything feels wrong, you get out. Immediately.”
The next afternoon I called Adrien.
He answered on the third ring, clipped and impatient.
“What is it, Mom?”
“Matthew needs clothes and school materials. He’ll come by tomorrow.”
Silence.
“He’s coming alone?”
“Yes. It’s his home too, unless you’ve forgotten that.”
Another pause.
“Fine. Tell him to be quick. Vanessa doesn’t want to see him.”
“He won’t stay long.”
I hung up before he could say anything else.
That evening Leticia brought over the cameras. We sewed one into the front of Matthew’s shirt and another near the shoulder seam. I tested the feed on my phone. Crystal clear video. Clean audio.
At dinner, Matthew tried to act calm, but I watched his hands shake when he reached for his fork.
That night I found him in bed staring at the ceiling.
“Can’t sleep?”
“I’m scared,” he admitted. “Not of Vanessa. Of what I might find. What if Dad really is living with a murderer?”
I sat on the edge of the bed and brushed the hair off his forehead.
“Whatever happens tomorrow, we face it together. You are not alone. Not while I’m alive.”
“I love you, Grandma.”
“I love you too. More than anything.”
He eventually drifted off.
I stayed there a little longer, listening to him breathe and thinking through every possible thing that could go wrong.
But underneath all of it was one steadying truth.
Vanessa had underestimated us.
The next day, at exactly two forty-five, Matthew stood in front of the mirror in my living room and adjusted his shirt while I checked the live feed one last time. Leticia waited in the car half a block from Adrien’s place. I sat in the back beside her with my phone in both hands.
“Ready?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Go in. Pack your things. If you find the candle holder, photograph it. Don’t touch it.”
“And if she starts something?”
“Leave. The second you feel danger, you leave.”
I hugged him hard, then let go.
The drive to Adrien’s neighborhood felt longer than it was. His house stood behind an automatic gate in a tidy subdivision where all the lawns looked identical and nobody ever seemed to be outside when you wanted witnesses. He had bought it with his first wife’s life-insurance payout—a fact that had always left a bitter taste in my mouth even before Vanessa came along.
Matthew walked up the path and rang the bell.
The camera trembled slightly with every step.
Vanessa opened the door.
Black sweatpants. tight pink top. hair in a high ponytail. No makeup. No softness. Without polish, her face looked harsher, the bones of it more predatory.
“So,” she said, looking him over, “you came. Didn’t think you had the guts.”
“I’m just here for my stuff. Dad said it was okay.”
“Your dad says a lot of things. Get in. Make it quick.”
He stepped inside.
Through the live feed I saw polished marble floors, expensive furniture, perfect decorative pillows, staged family photographs—the whole glossy set Vanessa had built around herself. Every surface looked clean enough to reflect light and false enough to crack if touched too honestly.
“Go to your room,” she said. “You’ve got thirty minutes.”
Matthew climbed the stairs.
The second the camera tilted into his room, I felt my stomach drop.
It had been trashed.
Posters ripped from the walls. Desk overturned. Books scattered. Sheets stripped off the bed. The room looked less like a teenager’s space than like a punishment scene.
“Oh my God,” Leticia breathed.
“What happened to my room?” Matthew asked, voice tight.
Vanessa called up from below, “You left it like a pigsty. Clean it up. Serves you right.”
He crouched, grabbed clothes, stuffed them into his backpack.
Then the camera caught the broken photo frame on the floor.
It was a picture of Matthew with Elaine, his mother, taken before she died.
There was a shoe print ground into the cracked glass.
I had to press my lips together to keep from making any sound that might distract him.
“Stay calm,” I whispered anyway, though he couldn’t hear me. “Stay calm.”
He opened the desk drawer.
Metal flashed beneath torn notebook pages.
“Wait,” I said, my voice so sharp Leticia flinched. “There.”
Matthew moved the papers aside.
The silver candle holder lay in the drawer like a piece of theater left behind after a bad performance.
Even through the grain of the feed I could see the dried dark smear near the base.
Blood.
“Jesus,” Leticia whispered.
“That’s it.”
Vanessa’s voice rose from the stairs.