“How shameless can you be?” my aunt burst out, stepping forward. Her voice shook with anger. “Have you ever once thought about how hard Denise worked to build this life?”
Kristen turned toward her, eyes flashing. “Stay out of it!”
But my aunt wasn’t alone now. Another relative murmured, “This is disgusting.” My uncle’s face had gone pale with fury.
The officers moved methodically, asking questions, taking notes, their professionalism a contrast to the chaos my family had created.
One officer turned to me. “Ms. Parker, we’ll proceed with filing the formal report. Please submit records showing how the duplicate key was made without authorization, along with the timestamps of the intrusions.”
“Yes,” I said. “The smart-lock access logs and the full set of cloud-stored surveillance footage are already prepared for transfer.”
I tapped on my phone. Data began syncing. The officer’s tablet chimed softly as files uploaded.
As the CEO of a tech company, my home security wasn’t just a couple of cameras from a big-box store. It was a system I’d designed like a product: redundancies, encrypted storage, multi-angle coverage, logs that couldn’t be altered without leaving evidence.