“Do you still have the security footage showing exactly what they removed?” Mara asked through the speaker.
Vanessa stopped breathing for half a second.
Derek looked at her.
I looked down at Grandma’s estate folder spread across the kitchen counter: photographs, inventory sheets, appraisals, probate records, and her signature beside page after page of household contents.
“Yes,” I said.
“Front entry and interior cameras.
I have the lockbox footage too.”
Mara’s voice stayed measured.
“And Vanessa never had permission to move into the house, dispose of the contents, or authorize renovations?”
“No.”
Vanessa finally found her voice.
“Oh, this is absurd.”
Mara heard her.
“Is your sister there?”
“Yes.”
Vanessa stepped closer to the phone.
“I’m right here, and before anybody starts throwing around legal threats, I did not steal anything.
Brianna was gone for six weeks.
We needed a temporary place while our condo was being renovated, and I improved a house she barely uses.”
I said nothing.
That irritated her more than an argument would have.
She pointed at the white couch.
“Look at this place.
It’s objectively better.”
Mara asked, “Did Brianna authorize you to replace the furniture?”
Vanessa rolled her eyes.
“She’s my sister.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Derek shifted beside the hallway.
Vanessa noticed and snapped, “Don’t look at me like that.”
He lowered his voice.
“What exactly is in that folder?”
I slid the first inventory sheet toward them.
There was Grandma’s leather couch, photographed years earlier in the same living room.
Beneath it was an inventory number and an appraisal notation.
The next photograph showed the sideboard Grandpa had built.
Another showed the driftwood table.
Another showed the quilt.
Even the little blue clay pot appeared in a photograph of the front porch.
Vanessa flipped through the pages faster.
“What is this supposed to prove?”
I answered quietly.
“That you should have asked before deciding anything in this house was junk.”
When Grandma died, the beach house had come to me through her estate arrangements.
Vanessa had known that much.
Everyone in the family had.
What Vanessa had never bothered to learn was that Grandma had been meticulous about the property.
She had documented the original contents room by room.
Some pieces had monetary value.
Others mattered because of provenance, family history, or the way the estate had been structured.
The records weren’t sentimental notes tossed into a drawer.
They were part of the property file that had passed through probate and into my keeping.
Mara had helped me review those papers months earlier.
Now she said, “Brianna, I want you to preserve every recording.
Don’t edit anything.
Don’t delete anything.
