Alex turned toward him.
“I said she had room.”
“You said the apartment would be empty until the wedding week,” Jenna snapped.
“You said we could settle in before she returned.”
The room shifted.
Until that moment, they had presented a united front.
Now each person was trying to move responsibility onto someone else.
David asked me to photograph every room before anyone packed or cleaned.
One security officer walked with me while the other remained by the front door.
The apartment looked worse when I examined it slowly.
My winter coats had been crushed into the utility closet to make room for garment bags.
Boxes of my dishes had been placed on the floor beside the trash chute.
My medications had been moved from the kitchen cabinet into a paper grocery bag beneath the sink.
In my bedroom, my jewelry tray had been emptied onto a towel.
My reading glasses were wedged beneath a perfume box.
Thomas’s letters had been removed from the locked cabinet and stacked beneath a curling iron.
A small brass key lay beside Mia’s makeup case.
The security officer picked it up with a gloved hand.
“Does this belong to you?”
I recognized it immediately.
It was the cabinet key I kept inside a porcelain dish at the back of my desk drawer.
Someone had searched my study.
When I returned to the living room, Jenna was arguing with David through the phone.
“This family has a wedding in ten days,” she said.
“Do you understand what she’s doing to us?”
I set the photograph of the brass key beside the blue folder.
“What I am doing to you?”
Jenna turned.
For the first time since I had entered the apartment, she looked uncertain.
“We made a mistake,” she said.
“But you’re escalating it to punish us.”
“You entered my home without permission.
You moved my belongings.
Someone searched my study and opened a locked cabinet.
Then you told me I was making the situation awkward.”
“Mia was looking for a phone charger,” she said.
Mia stared at her.
“I never said that.”
“Then why were you in the study?” I asked.
Mia’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Alex stepped between us.
“Enough.
Everyone needs to calm down.
Mom, I’ll pay for anything damaged.
They’ll leave tonight.
We don’t need lawyers and security involved.”
It sounded reasonable until I noticed Jenna watching him.
She was not frightened by the security officers.
She was frightened by the blue folder.
I followed her gaze and remembered the additional page bearing Alex’s name.
It was not part of the emergency-key agreement.
It was a copy of a property transfer inquiry David had received three weeks earlier.
Someone had contacted his office asking what documents would be required to add an adult child and a future spouse to the apartment deed.
The inquiry had been submitted using Alex’s email address.
When David first called me about it, I assumed there had been a misunderstanding.
