There were fake social media accounts.
Suddenly, everything started making horrible sense.
Every strange misunderstanding.
Every unexplained argument.
Every moment, Sarah looked heartbroken because I doubted her.
Then I found a tape recorder inside the suitcase.
I pressed play.
Sarah's voice filled the garage.
"If you're hearing this, it means I either ran out of time... or things got worse faster than I expected."
I nearly stopped breathing.
I pressed play.
"Months ago, I borrowed your mom's tablet while we were ordering decorations for Emma's birthday party. While I was using it, a notification popped up from a Facebook account using my name and photos. At first, I thought it was some weird mistake, or maybe someone was copying my profile online. But something felt wrong, so I opened it. Daniel, the account was pretending to be me."
I gasped!
"The more I looked, the worse it got. There were fake conversations, edited screenshots, and messages sent to this particular man pretending to come from me. I confronted your mother privately, hoping there was some explanation for all of it. But she denied everything immediately. That's when I started collecting proof."
"I thought it was some weird mistake."
Then came the sentence that shattered me.
"Diane doesn't want to share you. She wants to become the center of our house."
Suddenly, I remembered everything differently, especially the massive fight Sarah and I had six months earlier, the night I'd nearly moved out.
I remembered standing in our bedroom holding screenshots while Sarah cried so hard she could barely speak.
"I swear none of this is real," she kept saying.
I didn't believe her.
Then came the sentence that shattered me.
Now I realized my wife hadn't looked guilty that night. She looked terrified. Terrified that my mother was succeeding!
Then Sarah explained something else in the recording.
Toward the end of her life, she'd become constantly exhausted and dizzy. Doctors couldn't explain why.
Around that same time, Lucy accidentally overheard Diane pretending to be Sarah during a phone call.
Lucy later asked my wife what it meant.
That's when Sarah realized how far things had gone.
And with what she believed were her final chances to protect the kids, she told Lucy to warn me not to trust Grandma.
She looked terrified.
***
I collapsed onto the garage floor.
Every terrible memory hit me at once.
Every time Sarah begged me to believe her.
