“I love you too, my boy. More than words can say.”
He closed his eyes and eventually fell asleep. I stayed there a little longer, watching him breathe peacefully. I thought about all the dangers he would face the next day, all the things that could go wrong.
But I also thought about something else. That Chelsea had underestimated this family. She had underestimated a brave boy who refused to be another victim. And she had underestimated a grandmother who had hunted criminals all her life.
Tomorrow the serpent would show its fangs. But we already had the antidote.
The next day, Ethan entered that house with the cameras rolling. What we recorded that afternoon chilled our blood, and it gave us the weapon we needed to destroy Chelsea.
It was 2:45 p.m. Ethan was standing in front of the mirror in my living room, checking his shirt. The buttons with the hidden cameras were invisible to the naked eye. I checked for the tenth time that the transmission was working correctly on my phone.
“Clear audio, clear video,” I said. “Are you ready?”
Ethan took a deep breath.
“Ready.”
Linda was outside in her car, half a block from Rob’s house. We would be the backup. If something went wrong, we would go in immediately.
“Remember,” I said, putting my hands on his shoulders. “You go in, say hello normally, go to your room, pack your clothes. Meanwhile, you observe. If you see the candlestick or any other evidence, you record it, but don’t touch it. We don’t want her to accuse you of stealing anything. Understood?”
“Understood. And if she gets aggressive, I leave immediately.”
I gave him a strong hug. He smelled of soap and fear, but also of courage.
“Let’s go,” Linda said from the doorway. “It’s time.”
We went down to Linda’s car. I sat in the back seat with my phone in my hands, the screen showing what Ethan’s cameras saw. Linda drove in silence, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
We arrived at the Upper East Side. Rob’s house was large, two stories with a front yard and an electric gate. He had bought it with the life insurance money from his first wife—a house that should have been full of happy memories. Now it was a prison.
Ethan got out of the car. We watched him walk toward the front door. On my phone, the image moved with every step he took. He rang the bell.
The door opened. And there was Chelsea.
She wore black athletic pants and a tight pink blouse. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Without makeup, she looked younger, but also more calculating. Her eyes scanned Ethan up and down like a predator evaluating its prey.
“You showed up,” she said in a flat voice. “I thought you’d chicken out.”
“I came for my things. My dad said I could.”
“Your dad says a lot of things. Come in, but hurry. I don’t have all day.”
Ethan entered. The camera captured everything. The elegantly decorated living room, the marble floor, the paintings on the walls—everything impeccable, everything perfect. A façade.
“Go to your room. You have thirty minutes,” Chelsea ordered, closing the door behind him.
Ethan went up the stairs. The camera recorded every detail. He reached his room and opened the door.
My heart broke seeing what the cameras showed.
The room was completely trashed. Ethan’s clothes scattered on the floor, his posters ripped from the walls, his desk overturned, books strewn everywhere, his bed stripped of sheets—as if a hurricane had passed through there.
“My God,” Linda whispered, watching the screen in the rearview mirror.
I heard Ethan’s shaky voice through the audio.
“What happened to my room?”
Chelsea’s voice came from downstairs, yelling:
“You pack up your mess like the pig you are. That’s why your room is like that.”
Ethan began picking up his clothes and putting them into a backpack. His hands were shaking. The camera captured him pausing in front of a broken photo on the floor. It was a picture of him with his mother, taken a year before she died. The frame was in pieces. The photo had a shoe print on it.
I watched Ethan carefully pick it up, wipe off the dust, and put it in his backpack.
“Breathe, son,” I whispered, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. “Breathe.”
He finished packing his clothes. Then he opened his desk drawer, looking for his notebooks.
That’s when I saw it. On my phone screen, behind a pile of broken notebooks, something shone.
“Stop,” I murmured to myself. “Focus on that.”
As if he had heard me, Ethan moved the notebooks.
And there it was—a silver candlestick, heavy, antique, with dark spots at the base.
Blood.
“He found it,” Linda said. “That’s it.”
Chelsea’s voice interrupted from the stairs.
“Are you done? You’ve been up there for fifteen minutes.”
“Almost,” Ethan replied, his voice surprisingly calm.
Quickly, with trembling hands, he took out his personal phone and snapped several pictures of the candlestick. Then he left it exactly where it was and closed the drawer.
“Well done,” I murmured.
Ethan left his room with the backpack on his shoulder. He started down the stairs. Chelsea was waiting for him at the bottom, arms crossed.
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“Perfect. Then you can leave and not come back.”
“This is my house too,” Ethan said.
