Chapter 1: The Gift That Was Never a Gift
My name is Christine, and when my mother-in-law gave me an antique mantel clock as a "welcome to the family" gift right after our wedding, I genuinely thought it was sweet, if a little old-fashioned.
I placed it right on our living room shelf.
Almost immediately after that, things in my life started going strange in ways I couldn't quite explain.
My husband picked a fight with me over something I'd only said once, quietly, to myself in our bedroom while folding laundry, a small complaint about his mother's cooking I never repeated to another living soul.
He brought it up like I'd said it directly to his face.
Then money started disappearing from a small cash stash I kept hidden in a shoebox in our closet, an emergency fund neither my husband nor anyone else was supposed to know existed.
Twenty here, forty there, never enough to be dramatic, always just enough to make me question my own memory.
At a family dinner, my mother-in-law casually mentioned that she "heard" I hadn't been feeling well the previous Tuesday, a day I'd only brought up once, at home, to my husband, with no one else around.
I brushed all of it off individually.
Together, it started keeping me up at night.
Yesterday, dusting the shelf, my sleeve caught the edge of that clock and sent it crashing to the floor.
The glass face shattered, the wooden casing split open along one side, and something small and black rolled out across the carpet.
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What was hidden inside that clock?
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And how long had Christine's mother-in-law been listening?
Comment **"WOW"** if you want Part 2.
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