“Dad made me practice crying at the front door. He said you’d get angry when you got here, and the camera had to see it.”

Rachel obtained an emergency court order to preserve all digital backups tied to the property. Ross claimed the camera had disappeared — but Mrs. Odom had fresh footage of Gwendolyn throwing an electronics box into her truck.

The serial number on the box led the technicians straight to the linked cloud account.

The first recovered file was thirty-two seconds long.

In it, Gwendolyn pinched Casey’s arm hard enough to make her cry out while Ross adjusted the camera lens.

“Let her cry a bit more,” Ross muttered. “When Corinne loses her military control, we’ll have exactly what we need for court.”