Chapter 3 - THE THING JESSICA SAID TOO FAST
Donna did not call the police.
Not that morning.
Rachel hated that, but she understood it.
Donna was old-school Ohio practical: don’t invite a stranger into a family mess until you absolutely have to. She wanted the set found first. She wanted Jessica searched first. She wanted, most of all, for this not to be what it looked like.
Jessica still refused to hand over her purse.
Garrett finally took it from the dining-room chair when she turned to argue with him.
Inside were lipstick, receipts, a half-full pill bottle, a wallet, and a packet of gum.
No emerald set.
Donna’s face crumpled with visible relief and fresh confusion.
Jessica held out both hands.
“Well?”
Rachel didn’t apologize.
Neither did Garrett.
Because Jessica wasn’t angry the purse had been searched.
She was angry the search had happened too early.
Rachel knew that the same way she knew when Tyler was about to lie about sneaking cookies: there was triumph in the wrong places and panic in the right ones.
Melody tugged Rachel’s sleeve.
“I have more,” she whispered.
Rachel took both children upstairs to the guest room and locked the door behind them.
“What do you mean, baby?”
Melody sniffed once and held up the tablet.
“I was making a Christmas movie.”
Of course she was.
She filmed everything lately—cookies on cooling racks, Tyler’s Lego crashes, the dog next door wearing boots in the snow.
Rachel sat on the edge of the bed and opened the gallery.
There were twelve clips from that morning.
One showed Tyler pretending a wrapping-paper tube was a telescope. One showed Donna arranging stockings. One showed Jessica walking through the front hallway carrying a stack of folded coats and muttering because Melody was “always in the way.”
Rachel went still.
In the video, her own canvas tote was visible on the bench beneath the coat rack.
A minute later, downstairs, Jessica had suggested checking Rachel’s bag.
Rachel copied every file to her phone and then to cloud storage before she did anything else.
When she came back down, Garrett was standing beside Donna’s chair, rubbing both hands over his face.
Jessica was at the kitchen sink, angrily stacking dessert plates she hadn’t used.
Rachel said, “We’re leaving.”
Donna looked up immediately.
“No.”
The plea in that one word almost undid Rachel.
Then Donna straightened.
“No, not because you should stay here today. Because you need to send me the videos first.”
Jessica spun around.
“That’s insane.”
Rachel ignored her and AirDropped the files to Garrett’s phone and Donna’s iPad.
Only then did she collect the children’s coats.
Garrett followed her into the front hallway.
“Rach.”
She kept zipping Tyler’s jacket.
“If you ask me to calm down, I’m going to say something ugly.”
“I’m not asking that.”
He lowered his voice.
“But if we call the police on my sister based on kid videos and a missing jewelry set we haven’t even found—”
Rachel stopped.
“There it is.”
“What?”
“The reason she thought she could do this in the first place.”
Garrett stared at her.
“She always gets one more chance,” Rachel said. “One more explanation. One more version.”
That hurt him. Rachel could see it did.
But before he could answer, Melody spoke from the bottom stair.
“Daddy?”
Garrett turned.
“Aunt Jess was in Grandma’s room before presents,” Melody said. “And then she was by Mommy’s bag.”
May you like
Jessica had thrown Rachel’s daughter’s science kit into a wall.
But what frightened Rachel more was realizing Jessica had already been moving pieces around long before the first thing broke.
