Chapter 4 - The Eviction and the Evidence
The next morning, while Hannah slept peacefully in her private recovery room with Noah resting safely in a bassinet beside her, I returned to my house alone.
The front door, which I had left unlocked in my panic, hung slightly open.
Inside, the house was a disaster area. Plates covered in moldy food sat on the dining table. Empty wine bottles—expensive vintages I had saved for special occasions—were scattered across the rug.
I walked straight up to the master bedroom. In the corner sat Brittany’s open suitcase. Beside it on the nightstand was her tablet, unlocked and still connected to the home Wi-Fi.
I opened the video gallery.
My blood ran cold. There were dozens of video clips recorded over the past three days. Brittany had filmed Hannah crying on the floor, holding her stomach in agony while begging for water. In one video, my mother’s voice could be clearly heard in the background: "Leave her there, Brittany. When Ethan sees what a mess she is, he'll sign the house deed over to me just to get rid of her."
They hadn't just neglected my family—they had deliberately orchestrated a campaign of abuse to break Hannah mentally, hoping to force a divorce and secure my savings and house for themselves.
I backed up every single video to three separate cloud drives and saved them onto a flash drive for the prosecutor.
Then, I went downstairs, grabbed heavy contractor trash bags, and emptied every single possession belonging to Diane and Brittany—their clothes, their shoes, their makeup—out onto the front lawn in the pouring rain.
I called a locksmith and had every lock on the house replaced within two hours.
As the locksmith finished the last deadbolt, my phone rang. It was an attorney representing my mother from jail.
May you like
"Ethan," the lawyer said smoothly. "Your mother is willing to overlook this misunderstanding if you drop the charges and post her bail. She's elderly, Ethan. Jail is no place for her."
"Tell my mother," I replied, my voice as hard as cold iron, "that she can rot in a cell. And tell her if she ever steps within a thousand feet of my wife or son again, I will personally see to it that she spends the rest of her life behind bars."
