A hollowed-out impression in the dark blue velvet was all that remained of my mother’s gold locket.
My twelve-year-old niece, the family’s designated angel, had finally taken the one thing I couldn’t bear to lose.
Her mother, my sister-in-law, would call me a liar.
She’d paint me as a forgetful, paranoid woman making up vicious stories, the same performance she gave every time one of my sentimental things vanished after they visited.
What that perfect little thief and her vicious mother didn’t count on was that I was done playing their game, and I had just bought the one thing that would turn their quiet, perfect lives into a shrieking, undeniable siren of public humiliation.
The Silence After the Hummingbirds
The house settled into a quiet hum after they left. It was a familiar silence, one that followed every family gathering, but tonight it felt different. Heavier. I ran a dishrag over the already clean granite countertop, the circular motions a poor substitute for the frantic energy buzzing under my skin. My husband, Tom, was in the living room, channel surfing with the volume low, a sign he was decompressing from the social marathon.
The silence wasn’t just the absence of my brother-in-law’s booming laugh or my sister-in-law Cynthia’s high, sharp chatter. It was a pocket of air where something used to be. For the past year, it had become a ritual I dreaded. After they left, I’d do a quiet, secret inventory. A little silver salt spoon from my grandmother. A signed first edition of a poetry book I loved. Small things. Sentimental things. Things you could convince yourself you’d merely misplaced.
Tonight’s party had been for my son Ben’s return from his first semester at college. It was loud and joyful, full of overlapping stories and the clinking of glasses. Cynthia had been in top form, regaling everyone with tales of her daughter Madison’s latest achievements. Madison, at twelve, was the family’s designated angel. Her blonde hair was always in a perfect, glossy ponytail, her manners impeccable. She’d spent most of the evening curled in an armchair, reading a book, a portrait of youthful innocence.
I dried my hands and walked through the dining room, my eyes scanning the mantelpiece. The pair of tiny, porcelain hummingbirds were still there. Good. I continued down the hall toward our bedroom, my heart starting a low, anxious drumbeat against my ribs. It was a stupid feeling, this premonition of loss. It made me feel old and suspicious, two things I never wanted to be. But the feeling was as real as the hardwood floor beneath my feet. On the bureau, next to my jewelry box, was a small, framed photo of my mother. And pinned to the velvet matting beside it, there was usually a small, silver brooch shaped like a swallow in flight. Usually.
A Husband’s Gentle Logic
“Honey?” Tom’s voice came from the living room. “You okay? You’ve been pacing.”
I stood in the doorway of our bedroom, staring at the empty spot on the photo mat. The absence of the swallow felt like a hole punched through the wall. I walked back into the living room and stood in front of the television, blocking his view.
“It’s gone,” I said. My voice was flat.
He muted the TV, his brow furrowing in concern. “What’s gone?”
“The swallow brooch. Mom’s brooch. It was on the bureau.”
Tom sighed, a soft, tired sound. It wasn’t a dismissive sigh, but it was saturated with a gentle, masculine logic that I knew was coming. “Elaine, are you sure? You wore that blue blazer last week, didn’t you check the lapel?”
“I haven’t worn that blazer in a month,” I said, my voice rising slightly. “It was on the mat. I look at it every single day, Tom. It’s gone.”
He got up from the couch and put his hands on my shoulders, his touch meant to be grounding. “Okay, okay. Let’s not jump to conclusions. We had a dozen people in the house. It could have gotten knocked off. It could be under the bureau, or in a drawer…”
“Only one person went into our bedroom,” I said, the words tasting like poison.
His face tightened. “Don’t. Don’t start that again. She’s a kid, Elaine. She’s a sweet kid. What possible reason would she have to take a vintage silver brooch?”
“What reason did she have to take the salt spoon? Or my copy of Ariel? Or the tiny music box that played ‘Für Elise’?” I was ticking them off on my fingers, a litany of small, strange thefts that sounded insane when spoken aloud. “Every time they visit, something of mine, something with meaning, vanishes.”
“Coincidence,” he said, but his voice lacked conviction. He wanted to believe it. For the sake of his brother, for the sake of family harmony, he needed to believe I was just a messy, forgetful, fifty-two-year-old woman. “You’re stressed. Ben’s leaving again in a week. Let’s just look for it in the morning. It’ll turn up. It always does.”
But it never did.
The Angel in Question
I saw her, of course. I always did. It was a magnetic pull, the way my eyes would find Madison in a crowded room. Earlier in the evening, while I was refilling a bowl of chips in the kitchen, I’d seen her slip away from the living room’s noise. Cynthia was holding court, describing in excruciating detail Madison’s selfless volunteer work at the local animal shelter. “She just has a heart of pure gold,” Cynthia had said, beaming. “She feels things so deeply.”
A few minutes later, I walked down the hall to grab a throw blanket from the linen closet. The door to our bedroom, which I’d left slightly ajar, was now almost fully closed. A sliver of light spilled from underneath. I’d paused, my hand on the closet knob, my breath caught in my throat. I heard a faint click, the sound of my jewelry box lid closing.
I should have thrown the door open. I should have marched in there and said, “What are you doing?” But I didn’t. The social contract, the deeply ingrained need to avoid conflict, to not accuse a child, held me paralyzed. What if I was wrong? What if she was just looking for a tissue, or admiring a photograph? The scene that would erupt—Cynthia’s screeching defense, the family schism—was too horrible to contemplate.
So I waited. A minute later, the door opened and Madison emerged, her face a mask of placid innocence. She gave a little start when she saw me. “Oh! Hi, Aunt Elaine. I just needed to use your mirror to check if I had spinach in my teeth.” She smiled, a perfect, toothy grin. There was no spinach.
“Everything okay?” I’d asked, my voice strained.
“Perfect,” she chirped, and then she’d drifted back toward the living room, a ghost in a pink sweater.
Now, standing in the silent house, that moment played over and over in my mind. Her calm, practiced lie. The way her eyes hadn’t flickered. She felt things so deeply, Cynthia had said. I wondered what, exactly, she felt when she palmed a piece of my mother’s memory and slipped it into her pocket.
A Drawer of Ghosts
I couldn’t sleep. Tom’s steady breathing beside me was a rhythm of normalcy that felt utterly alien. I slipped out of bed and padded back to the bureau. In the dark, I opened the top drawer where I kept the most important things. There wasn’t much left. My mother hadn’t been a woman of means, but what she’d had, she’d cherished.
My fingers brushed against the soft velvet pouch that held her wedding band, then the worn leather of my father’s watch. At the very back was the heart of the collection. The heart of my memory of her. I pulled out the heavy, gold locket. It was warm from the residual heat of the day, smooth and familiar in my palm.
I clicked it open. On one side was a tiny, faded photograph of my father, looking impossibly young in his army uniform. On the other, a picture of me, age five, with a gap-toothed smile and scraped knees. My mother had put it in there the day before she died. She’d pressed it into my hand in her hospital bed, her own hand frail and cool. “So you never forget who loves you,” she had whispered, her voice raspy.
I held it tight in my fist, the engraved edges digging into my skin. This was the one. This was the thing I couldn’t bear to lose. The other items were fragments, echoes of a life. The locket was her last word. All the missing pieces—the spoon, the book, the brooch—were just tremors before the earthquake. I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that the locket was what Madison, and by extension Cynthia, was really after. It was the prettiest, the most valuable. It was the final prize. And the thought of that perfect, angelic child, with her quiet hands and empty eyes, touching this locket, made a rage I hadn’t felt in years begin to smolder deep in my belly.
An Unwanted Invitation
The phone rang on Tuesday afternoon. It was Cynthia, her voice like chimes in a hurricane. “Elaine! I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time. I was just thinking, it’s been ages since we had a proper, quiet dinner, just the four of us. This Saturday?”
Ages? I saw them four days ago. My hand tightened on the receiver. A quiet dinner was Cynthia’s code for a captive audience. No other family members to act as buffers, no party noise to drown out her monologues. Just me, Tom, her, and her husband, my brother-in-law, Mike, a man so beaten down by his wife’s personality that he communicated mostly in weary nods.
“Oh, I don’t know, Cynthia,” I started, my mind racing for a plausible excuse. “Tom and I have been meaning to—”
“Nonsense! Madison would be so disappointed. She adores you. She was just saying the other day how she wishes she could spend more time with her Aunt Elaine. Seven o’clock. Don’t be late!”
Before I could formulate another protest, she’d hung up. I stood there, phone in hand, feeling like I’d just been conscripted. Tom came in from the garage, wiping grease from his hands with a rag. He saw my face.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Cynthia.”
“Dinner. Saturday. It wasn’t a request.”
He winced. “Look, honey. Maybe it’s for the best. A small group. Less chaos. Nothing can go missing if we’re all sitting around one table, right?”
His optimism felt like a slap. “You think she confines her stealing to cocktail hour? This isn’t about opportunity, Tom. It’s a compulsion. And Cynthia enables it.”
“Enables it? She doesn’t even believe it’s happening!” he argued, his voice laced with frustration. “Just… let’s go. We’ll keep an eye on things. We’ll have a nice, boring dinner, and we’ll come home, and all your jewelry will be exactly where you left it. It’ll be fine.”
He wanted it to be fine. I wanted, more than anything, to believe him. But the dread that had been my constant companion since Sunday night told me it wouldn’t be.
A Calculated Risk
Saturday evening arrived, draped in a heavy, humid twilight. As I got dressed, I stood in front of my jewelry box. My hand hovered over the gold locket. The smart thing to do, the sane thing, would be to hide it. Tuck it away in a sock drawer, put it in the safe deposit box at the bank, leave it with a neighbor. Every rational instinct screamed at me to protect it.
But another part of me, a stubborn, weary part, resisted. Hiding my own things in my own house felt like a surrender. It felt like I was conceding that I was the crazy one, the one who had to alter her life to accommodate a phantom menace that everyone else refused to see. If I hid the locket, I was admitting that my twelve-year-old niece was a thief. I was admitting that my sister-in-law was a liar. I was accepting the ugly truth of it all, and I wasn’t ready.
I wanted to be wrong. I desperately, achingly, wanted to go to this dinner, come home, and find the locket sitting right where I left it. I wanted to be able to turn to Tom and say, with genuine relief, “You were right. I was being paranoid.” The possibility of that relief was a powerful lure.
So I made a decision. A calculated risk, I told myself, though it felt more like a prayer. I picked up the locket, its weight a familiar comfort in my hand. I clicked it open, looked at the tiny faces of my parents, and then closed it. I placed it back in its velvet-lined compartment, in plain sight, right at the front of the jewelry box. A test. A foolish, hopeful test. I was betting the most precious thing I owned against the slim chance that I had been wrong all along.
The Bedroom Excursion
The dinner was as excruciating as I’d anticipated. Cynthia talked nonstop about a minor squabble with the PTA, casting herself as the martyred hero in a suburban drama of epic proportions. Mike nodded. Tom tried to steer the conversation toward sports. I pushed a piece of dry chicken around my plate, my stomach in a tight, acidic knot.
Madison was a silent presence at the table, picking at her food and offering one-word answers when addressed directly. She looked pale. About halfway through Cynthia’s dessert monologue—a tirade about the inferiority of store-bought pie crust—Madison put her fork down.
“Mom, my head really hurts,” she murmured, pressing her fingers to her temples.
Cynthia’s attention snapped to her daughter, her face flooding with theatrical concern. “Oh, my poor baby! Is it the fluorescent lights? I told them these new bulbs were a menace.” She turned to me, her voice dripping with maternal martyrdom. “Elaine, dear, would you mind terribly if Maddy went to lie down in your bedroom for a little while? It’s always so dark and quiet in there. It would do her a world of good.”
The world stopped. The air grew thick. Tom shot me a look, a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head. He was telling me to say no, to make an excuse. But Cynthia’s eyes were boring into me, daring me to refuse her ailing, angelic child a moment of comfort. In that moment, I was trapped. Saying no would be an overt accusation, a declaration of war. It would be the end of civility.
“Of course,” I heard myself say, the words feeling like they were clawed from my throat. “Whatever she needs.”
Cynthia beamed. “You’re a saint.”
Madison slid from her chair and padded down the hallway. I listened to her footsteps recede, followed by the soft click of my bedroom door closing. The sound echoed in the dining room, a gunshot in the silence of my own foolishness. I had just willingly led the lamb to the slaughter. And the lamb was me.
The Hollow Velvet
The drive home was silent. Tom kept reaching over and squeezing my hand, but he didn’t say a word. He knew. We both knew. The moment Madison had walked down that hall, the test was over. The results were in.
I walked into the house ahead of him, my keys still in my hand. I didn’t turn on the lights in the entryway, didn’t take off my coat. I walked straight down the dark hall and into our bedroom. The moonlight coming through the window was enough to see by.
The room was still and quiet. The pillow on my side of the bed had a small indentation in it where a head had rested. I didn’t look at the pillow. My eyes went directly to the top of the bureau, to the dark wood of my jewelry box.
My heart was a frantic bird beating against my ribs. My breath was shallow. This was the moment of truth, the final confirmation that would change everything. I reached out a trembling hand and lifted the lid.
The velvet lining was a field of dark blue, dotted with the familiar shapes of earrings, rings, and bracelets. But in the front compartment, the one I had so deliberately placed the locket in, there was only a hollowed-out impression. A ghost of a shape in the fabric.
It was gone.
A wave of something cold and sharp washed over me, stealing my breath. It wasn’t just grief for the object itself. It was the violation. It was the confirmation of the gaslighting, the proof that I wasn’t paranoid or messy or forgetful. I was a victim. And it was the chilling, absolute certainty of who had done it, and who would lie to the bitter end to protect the little thief. I sank onto the edge of the bed, the open, empty jewelry box before me like a wound. Tom appeared in the doorway, his silhouette stark against the hall light. He didn’t have to ask. The rigid set of my shoulders told him everything.
The Rehearsal
I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, while a cold, hard anger began to crystallize around the raw grief in my chest. The hurt was still there, a deep, throbbing ache for my mother, for the last piece of her I had to hold. But the anger was new. It was clean and sharp and focused.
By morning, I had a plan. Or rather, the beginning of one. I couldn’t go in screaming. That’s what Cynthia would expect, what she would use to paint me as unhinged. I had to be calm. I had to be rational. I had to give her an out, a way to save face, even though she deserved none.
I spent an hour in the kitchen, coffee growing cold in my mug, rehearsing the phone call. I would be gentle. I would be concerned. “Cynthia, hi. I have a bit of an awkward situation. My mother’s gold locket seems to have gone missing after dinner last night. I was wondering if Madison might have picked it up by accident? You know how kids are, attracted to shiny things. Maybe she put it in her pocket to look at later and forgot.”
The lie tasted like ash in my mouth. Madison hadn’t picked it up by accident. She had stolen it. But this was the game. This was the dance of family politics. I had to offer her a plausible off-ramp, a story she could tell herself and everyone else that would allow the locket to be returned without a full-blown catastrophe. I practiced the lines over and over, modulating my tone, trying to drain the rage and accusation out of my voice, leaving only mild, regretful concern. I was preparing to hand my sister-in-law a carefully constructed, face-saving lie on a silver platter. All she had to do was take it.
The Fury of a Mother Bear
I made the call at ten o’clock. I let it ring three times, took a deep breath, and launched into my carefully rehearsed script.
“Cynthia, hi. It’s Elaine.”
“Elaine! To what do I owe the pleasure?” Her voice was offensively cheerful.
“I’m calling about something a little awkward,” I began, my voice steady. “After you all left last night, I noticed my mother’s gold locket was missing from my jewelry box. I know Madison was in my room for a bit, and I was just thinking, maybe she picked it up to look at and forgot to put it back? You know how shiny things can be…”
There was a dead silence on the other end of the line. For a split second, I thought it might work. Then, the explosion.
“Are you kidding me?” Her voice went from sunny to ice in a heartbeat. “Are you actually, seriously, accusing my daughter of stealing from you?”
“No, of course not,” I said quickly, trying to backtrack. “I just thought maybe by mistake—”
“A mistake? You think my daughter is so stupid she ‘mistakenly’ puts a gold locket in her pocket? How dare you! How dare you, Elaine!” Her voice was rising to a shriek. “Madison would NEVER steal. She is a good, sweet girl who was sick in your house, and this is how you repay her? By concocting this disgusting story because you’re too messy to keep track of your own things?”
The injustice of it was staggering. It was a full-frontal assault, a masterclass in gaslighting. She twisted my gentle inquiry into a vicious attack, my loss into a personal failing.
“I’m not messy, Cynthia,” I said, my own voice now trembling with rage. “It was there before you arrived and it was gone after you left. Madison was the only other person in that room.”
“So that’s it? You’ve decided to crucify a twelve-year-old child because you’re paranoid and cruel. You know, I’ve always felt sorry for you, Elaine. All alone in that big house now that Ben’s gone. You must be terribly lonely to have to invent this kind of drama. Don’t you ever, ever call me with this kind of filth again.”
The line went dead. I stood there, receiver in my hand, shaking so hard my teeth chattered. She hadn’t just denied it. She had savaged me.
The Aftermath of the Accusation
Tom found me still standing in the kitchen, staring at the wall, the phone back in its cradle. He took one look at my white, stricken face and wrapped his arms around me. I didn’t cry. I was too far beyond tears. I just stood there, rigid in his embrace, vibrating with a toxic cocktail of fury and violation.
“She…,” I started, but my voice broke.
“I heard,” he said softly, his chin resting on the top of my head. “I heard most of it from the other room.” He held me tighter. “I am so, so sorry, honey. I’m sorry I ever doubted you. I’m sorry I made you go. I should have listened.”
His words were a comfort, but they couldn’t touch the cold, hard knot that had formed in my gut. The theft of the locket was a wound. Cynthia’s words were salt, ground into it with vicious glee. She hadn’t just protected her daughter; she had gone on the offensive, painting me as a pathetic, malicious, half-senile woman. She had turned my grief into my shame.
We sat at the kitchen table for a long time. The anger had burned out, leaving behind a bleak, empty landscape. The locket was gone forever. I knew I would never see it again. Cynthia would make sure of that. It would be hidden or sold, its history erased, its meaning obliterated. I had not only lost the last tangible piece of my mother, but I had also lost a part of my family. The illusion of civility, the pretense that we could all get along, had been shattered.
Tom made calls. He left a terse, angry message for his brother, Mike. He told his parents what had happened, the bare facts, his voice tight with a control I knew was costing him dearly. The family was breaking. And it was all because of a small, gold locket and the big, ugly lie that protected its thief.
A Seed of an Idea
I spent the rest of the day in a fog. I wandered through the house, touching things, trying to ground myself. But everything felt… tainted. The armchair where Madison had sat. The hallway she’d walked down. The very air in my bedroom felt thick with her presence. The sense of violation was a physical thing, a film on my skin I couldn’t scrub off.
Late in the afternoon, I was sitting on the couch, scrolling numbly through my phone, looking for a distraction. My thumb flicked past news articles, social media posts, and then it stopped on a targeted ad. It was a sleek, minimalist video for a small, square tracking tile. “Never lose your keys again,” the text read. The video showed a woman attaching the tile to her keychain, then using an app on her phone to make it beep loudly from under a pile of cushions.
I stared at the screen. My mind was a blank slate, hollowed out by grief and anger. And then, into that emptiness, a single, cold, clear thought dropped like a stone in a silent pool. The ad wasn’t about finding lost things. It was about finding stolen things.
A new kind of energy began to fizz in my veins, displacing the lethargy. It wasn’t the hot, messy rage of yesterday. This was different. It was patient. It was methodical. It was the quiet, precise anger of an engineer drawing a blueprint. My birthday was in three weeks. Cynthia would, of course, insist on coming. She would have to, to maintain the fiction that she was the wronged party, graciously forgiving my “episode.” She would come over, full of false sympathy, and her perfect, angel-faced daughter would be with her.
An idea, terrible and beautiful and exquisitely petty, began to take shape. I wasn’t going to get my mother’s locket back. That was a loss I would have to mourn. But justice? Justice came in many forms. And sometimes, the most satisfying justice wasn’t loud and explosive. Sometimes, it was a sound that could not be gaslit away.
The Perfect Bait
The following Saturday, I went shopping. It was the first time I had felt a sense of purpose since the phone call. I wasn’t looking for a replacement locket; that would have felt like a betrayal. I was hunting.
I went to a high-end department store, the kind with hushed carpets and air that smelled faintly of expensive perfume. I bypassed the jewelry counters, the ghosts of what I’d lost still too sharp to face. I went straight to the handbags.
I needed something specific. It had to be beautiful, but not so flashy that it screamed “bait.” It had to be desirable, the kind of thing a woman like Cynthia would covet but never buy for herself, and the kind of thing a budding kleptomaniac like Madison would see as a glittering prize. I finally found it: a soft, buttery leather tote bag in a rich cognac color. It was structured but not stiff, with a subtle gold clasp and a scent of pure, unadulterated luxury. It was the kind of bag that whispered “I have my life together.”
I bought it, along with the smallest, most powerful tracking tile I could find online. When I got home, I performed what felt like minor surgery. With a seam ripper and a curved needle, I carefully opened a small section of the bag’s thick fabric lining. I slipped the slim, silent tile inside, nestling it between the layers of fabric and leather. I stitched the seam shut with a perfectly matched thread. It was invisible. Untraceable by touch. But I knew it was there, a tiny, sleeping sentinel waiting for its signal. I placed the handbag back in its box, complete with tissue paper and a ribbon, and put it on the top shelf of my closet. The trap was set. All I had to do was wait.
The Birthday Performance
My birthday party was a subdued affair. Tom and I had agreed to keep it small, just a few close friends and the necessary family contingent: his parents, and, of course, Cynthia, Mike, and Madison. Cynthia arrived bearing a ridiculously oversized bouquet of funereal lilies and a look of profound, pitying sadness, as if I were a frail creature she was bravely choosing to tolerate.
“Elaine,” she’d said, enveloping me in a stiff, papery hug. “Happy birthday. I do hope you’re feeling more yourself.”
The performance was almost enough to make me laugh. I played my part, the slightly fragile but grateful hostess. After we ate, I moved to the main event. “Tom and I agreed not to do big gifts this year,” I announced to the room, “but I saw something I’ve wanted for ages, so I decided to treat myself.”
I brought out the box from the closet. The room quieted as I untied the ribbon and lifted the lid. I pulled out the cognac leather handbag, letting it catch the light. There were appreciative murmurs from my friends.
“Oh, that’s lovely, Elaine,” my mother-in-law said.
I ran my hand over the smooth leather. “Isn’t it? I just fell in love. And look at all the features.” I made a point of opening it, showing everyone the silk-lined interior, the zippered pockets, the clever little compartments. I walked it around the room, letting my friends feel the quality of the leather. I made sure to pass right in front of the armchair where Madison was sitting, her eyes, wide and unblinking, tracking the bag’s every move. Cynthia shot it a look of dismissive envy before turning away to inspect her manicure.
“Well,” I said, giving the bag a final, theatrical pat, “I’ll just put this away in the bedroom with my coat before someone spills wine on it.” I carried it down the hall, placed it on my bed in plain sight, and left the bedroom door wide open. The curtain was up. The actors were in place.
The Inevitable Disappearance
The rest of the party passed in a blur of small talk and birthday cake. I kept a detached part of my mind on a timer, tracking Madison’s movements without ever looking at her directly. I saw her excuse herself to go to the bathroom. She was gone for ten minutes, far longer than necessary. When she returned, her cheeks were slightly flushed, but her expression was as placid as ever.
An hour later, Cynthia began her loud, drawn-out ritual of departure, gathering coats and complaining about the late hour. “Maddy has her advanced math tutor early tomorrow,” she announced, as if anyone had asked. “A mind like hers needs its rest.”
They were the last to leave. I stood at the door, smiling a brittle, polite smile as they filed out. “Thanks so much for coming,” I said, my voice perfectly even.
“Of course,” Cynthia said, patting my arm with condescending sympathy. “Take care of yourself.”
I closed the door behind them and leaned against it, my heart beating a slow, steady, triumphant rhythm. I didn’t rush. I let Tom start clearing plates. I walked into the kitchen, poured myself a glass of water, and took a slow sip. Then, and only then, did I walk down the hall to my bedroom.
The bed was empty. My coat was still there, slung over a chair. But the cognac-colored handbag, my beautiful, expensive bait, was gone. I felt a smile touch my lips, a real one this time. It wasn’t a happy smile. It was the smile of a predator that has just watched its prey walk, with perfect, predictable arrogance, straight into the snare.
The Call and the Alarm
The call came the next morning, right on schedule. I was sitting at the kitchen table, my phone in front of me, the tracking app open on the screen. A little blue dot, representing my handbag, was pulsing steadily from an address I knew very well.
“Elaine, darling,” Cynthia’s voice oozed with fake concern when I answered. “I was just calling to see how you were doing after the party. And, well, I have the most dreadful news. It seems my Madison has misplaced her little charm bracelet. I think it might have slipped off at your house last night. Would you mind having a look around for it?”
The audacity was breathtaking. She was creating a pretext to come back, to search my house for something she could claim Madison had “accidentally” swapped for the handbag. It was a classic Cynthia maneuver.
“Oh, that’s a shame, Cynthia,” I said, my voice a placid sea. I let her talk for another minute, spinning her web of lies about the bracelet’s sentimental value. As she was mid-sentence, my thumb hovered over the red button on my screen that read: PLAY SOUND.
I pressed it.
Over the line, through Cynthia’s voice, I heard it. A faint, high-pitched, and insistent alarm. Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep. It grew louder, as if someone was frantically moving toward the source of the sound, toward the phone she was holding to her ear.
Cynthia’s words faltered. “What… what is that noise?” she stammered. The beeping was now deafeningly clear over the line. A frantic, undeniable shriek of technology. She was sputtering now, making incoherent noises.
I leaned back in my chair, holding the phone loosely to my ear, and I let the sound play for a few more seconds, a beautiful, piercing symphony of truth. Then, I spoke, my voice calm, quiet, and absolutely final.
“Cynthia,” I said, as the alarm wailed on her end of the line, exposing every lie, every denial, every last bit of her poisonous protection. “Is that my birthday present I hear?”
About the Author
