Set it inside a canvas grocery bag.
Reached into her purse. Pulled out a small plastic bottle.
Dropped that in too.
The whole thing took under ninety seconds. She was gone before the clip ended.
“Allison.” Grace’s voice went careful. “You want me to send this, or do you want me to call somebody?”
“Send it. Don’t delete anything on your end. Not one file.”
Here was the part that should have felt like relief and instead felt like the floor dropping an inch under my chair.
Vanessa had come back for the dispenser. For the bottle.
Not the cup.
Because the cup was already gone. Michael had bagged it the instant he suspected something, kept it out of every hand in that yard, and it had ridden to the hospital strapped in beside our daughter.
Vanessa didn’t know that.
She’d walked eleven minutes back into a house full of shocked guests to erase evidence that no longer mattered, because the evidence that did matter was already under fluorescent lights at a lab thirty minutes away.
