Chapter 3: The Family Laugh History

The next day, my parents went out with Paige to shop for the gala.

Before leaving, my mother sent me the password to their cloud drive with a smile. “I’ll leave organizing the videos to you. It’ll give you a bigger part to play in front of the guests.”

So they had prepared all of this in advance.

I opened the shared family drive and found a folder titled *Bennett Family Laugh History*. It was filled with raw footage Paige had filmed on a GoPro.

The first video was from my birthday.

They had called to tell me my apartment had been robbed. I’d rushed home to find drawers overturned, my belongings strewn everywhere. I was shaking with fear. It wasn’t until Paige crawled out of the closet that I realized none of it was real.

The camera never stopped rolling.

It captured me collapsing to the floor, crying so hard I could barely breathe.

Off-camera, my parents were laughing. Caleb even looked straight into the lens and said, “She actually believed it.”

The footage jumped from one prank to the next.

They’d lied and told me my dog was missing, then filmed me searching in the rain for three hours. Paige had swapped my cover letter with a joke version, humiliating me in front of an interviewer.

These were the warm family memories they planned to broadcast to hundreds of guests.

My stomach turned, but I didn’t close the window.

I selected every raw file and downloaded them all to an encrypted hard drive.

Then another clip loaded.