“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.
