Chapter 5 - The True Colors
Diane suddenly stood up from the barstool, her frail act vanishing instantly. Her eyes were hard, her mouth set in a thin, vicious line.
"So what if he did?" Diane snarled, glaring at me with raw venom. "He is your husband! Everything you have should belong to him anyway! What kind of selfish woman keeps her maiden name on a deed while her husband struggles? You set him up to fail! You made him feel small, so he did what a real man had to do to take care of his family!"
I stared at her in utter disbelief. "A real man? A real man commits a felony against his spouse because his mother raised him to believe the world owes him a free ride?"
"Don't you dare talk about how I raised my son!" Diane shrieked, advancing toward me again. "You’ve looked down on us from the day Scott brought you home! With your fancy degrees, your little tech startup, your clean suits! You think you’re better than us! But you’re nothing without Scott's family! You’re just a cold, barren workaholic who can't even keep a hot meal on the table!"
"Mom, stop! Don't make it worse!" Brooke cried out, tugging at Diane’s arm. Brooke wasn't being noble; she was terrified of being named an accessory to bank fraud.
"I will not stop!" Diane yelled, shaking Brooke off. "She threw four hundred dollars worth of prime beef into the garbage can just out of spite! She’s unhinged! If anyone calls the police, it’s going to be me! I’m going to tell them she attacked me, destroyed property, and locked us in!"
"Mom, please, shut your mouth!" Scott pleaded, burying his face in his hands.
"Go ahead, Diane," I said quietly, pointing toward the corner ceiling above the refrigerator.
A tiny green LED light blinked steadily from a small, discreet dome.
"Look up," I whispered.
Diane stopped mid-breath. Her eyes traced my finger to the ceiling camera.
"That’s a 4K Nest Cam with two-way audio," I explained, my voice steady and cold as winter ice. "It records continuously to an encrypted cloud server. It captured you grabbing fourteen pounds of ribs and putting them in Brooke’s containers. It captured you calling me an arrogant outsider. It captured me dropping the remaining four pounds into the trash. And most importantly..."
I stepped right up to Diane, stopping inches from her face.
"...it captured your right hand swinging across my face with enough force to bruise my jaw. In the state of Georgia, battery against a household member inside their own residence is an automatic arrest. No warning. No citations. You leave in handcuffs."
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Diane took a step back, her complexion turning the color of curdled milk. She touched her own lips, her chest rattling as she struggled to inhale. "You... you recorded me?"
"I record everything in my house," I replied. "And right now, that cloud footage is already synced to my attorney's inbox and saved on two separate local drives."
