Sat there.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Thirty minutes.
I just sat there in their driveway.
I finally drove home, went straight to the couch, didn’t take my jacket off.
Just sat there.
Then something small and warm landed on my lap.
Pickle.
My kitten.
He’s tiny, gray, has this one ear that folds weird.
I got him about a month ago.
He climbed right up and started doing that kneading thing on my sleeve.
And something clicked.
The cameras.
I set them up because of him, actually.
Baby-monitor-type cameras.
Two of them.
One in the living room.
One near the front door.
I work late sometimes, and he was so young. I just wanted to check on him during the day.
Make sure he wasn’t stuck somewhere or knocking things off shelves.
I’d been meaning to tell my family about them.
Just never got around to it.
I grabbed my laptop, opened the cloud storage, and started rewinding through yesterday’s footage.
Didn’t take long at all.
There she was.
My mother.
She used her spare key.
I gave it to her like two years ago, just in case of emergencies.
She came in, went straight to the closet in the living room like she knew exactly where to go, opened it, took the card out of the dish on the second shelf, and left.
The whole thing took maybe 40 seconds.
A key given out of love, used to walk in and take everything.
And here’s the thing.
Without that camera, Trinity had almost no case.
Sometimes the smallest decision you make for completely unrelated reasons ends up being the thing that saves you.
I watched it three times.
I just sat there with Pickle on my lap staring at the screen.
Okay.
So now I had something real.
I called Jessica.
She’s a friend from way back.
Works at a law office now.
I told her everything.
The withdrawals.