My Parents Gave My Room To My Stepsister. But She Smashed A Wall And…

I admitted that Rebecca often complained about me having too much space, saying things like it wasn’t fair that one kid got a studio apartment while her daughter had to fit everything into a bedroom. She never said Victoria should take the garage from me, but she implied I was selfish for keeping such a large space to myself.

The detective’s voice quieted and she asked me to repeat what Victoria said at the hospital when she accused me. Victoria claimed I made her feel useless and invisible, that she only wanted to belong in the family, but I had to have the coolest room and all the attention. I started shivering because I wondered if she was correct, if I had been showing off with the garage and pushed her into doing something desperate.

Detective Cruz softly asked whether I thought I caused the accident.,

I responded, “I didn’t know anymore.”

Everyone kept saying if I had shared my room or helped Victoria decorate hers, none of this would have happened. Maybe they were right. Maybe I was selfish and needed to be a better sister.

Detective Cruz closed her iPad and laid it on the table between us. She said there could be several legal issues around the demolition, depending on what the full investigation revealed. If Victoria intended to damage the house, that could be one thing.,

If my garage renovation was done without permits, that was a code violation. If anyone else planned or knew about the demolition, that raised other questions. Even if Victoria only endangered herself by knocking down a load-bearing wall, reckless endangerment was serious.

When I realized she was talking about criminal charges, my mouth dropped. I asked if Victoria could go to jail, and the detective said probably not given her current condition, but the family could face fines and legal consequences. Rebecca could face issues if she knew about or encouraged the demolition plan.

The detective asked if I would consent to having my phone and laptop examined by their tech team to verify that I wasn’t involved in Victoria’s plans. I agreed immediately, unlocking my phone and sliding it across the table. I also gave her my laptop password, desperate to prove I didn’t know what Victoria was planning.

Detective Cruz thanked me and said a tech specialist would make copies of everything and return my devices within 48 hours. She stood up and shook my hand again, saying I was free to go and they would be in touch if they had more questions. I grabbed my keys and left the interview room, my legs shaky and weird.

I left the police station at 6 p.m., hands still trembling as I unlocked my car. I sat in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, just breathing, trying to process everything the detective said about permits, fraud, and criminal charges. I texted Dad that the interview was over, but it was intense.

He responded an hour later with, “Okay,” and nothing else.

No inquiries about what they requested or how I felt. I went home, stopped into our driveway, and sat for 20 minutes watching the garage lights shine through the glass. The space that had made me proud now seemed wrong.

The Cost of Reckless Ambition

The next morning, I was pouring cereal in the kitchen when Dad’s phone rang. He answered and his face went from confused to pale as he listened to the caller. After he hung up, he told me and Rebecca to sit at the table.,

Dad’s voice was flat as he read from his notes from the conversation. Victoria had inquired, “How long does an insurance claim take?” “What happens if you destroy a house without a permit, and does homeowners insurance cover accidental demolition?”

Rebecca started crying immediately, saying Victoria couldn’t have understood what those searches meant. She said she was just a kid researching random things. But I could see in Dad’s face that he knew what I knew, that Victoria had been planning this and thinking about the insurance angle.

Later that morning, Ethan sent a follow-up email with more details from the forensics report. Dad opened it on his laptop, and we all crowded around to read., Victoria had also searched, “Can you get in trouble for knocking down the wrong bar?” and “Structural damage insurance payout average,” two days before the disaster.

This indication that Victoria had thought through the repercussions and bet that Dad’s insurance would heal anything that went wrong made me ill. Victoria planned her sledgehammer grab and calculated that insurance would save her if things went wrong, according to the investigator’s report. The morning of the accident, when we left for my cousin’s graduation, Victoria had searched, “How to fake being sick convincingly” and “Best excuses to skip family event,”, before telling us she had a headache.

Dad read this part out loud and Rebecca muttered. Victoria had planned, researched, and prepared for this whole thing, but she was 19 and probably thought she could just knock down a wall and have a bigger, cooler room by the time we got home. I spent the afternoon in my car in the library parking lot where I used to work before everything happened.

She didn’t plan to become paralyzed or have the ceiling collapse on her, so I wasn’t sure if knowing she planned it made it better or worse. My phone buzzed around 7:00 that evening while I was still in the parking lot, and Detective Cruz’s name lit up the screen. I answered, and she said the neighbors had given another statement about something they remembered from three days before the accident.

A delivery truck had dropped off a package at our house, and the neighbor watched Victoria sign for it through their kitchen window. Detective Cruz asked if Dad had ordered anything recently, and I put her on speaker so I could drive home., He scrolled through his laptop’s order history from the past month, shaking his head.

No sledgehammer, no tools, nothing heavy delivered to the house. Detective Cruz speculated that Victoria had ordered the sledgehammer herself using someone else’s account or card, planning the demolition days in advance. The detective noted that the neighbor’s statement showed clear preparation, not a sudden angry impulse.

Victoria had time to think about what she was doing and time to stop, but she ordered the tool and waited for it., The neighbor also reported the sounds they heard the day everything happened. Detective Cruz read from her notes, explaining how the neighbor was doing dishes around 1:00 p.m. when they heard music playing upstairs at our house, loud enough to hear through the walls.

At first, they thought Victoria was just being a teenager blasting music while we were gone, but around 1:30, they heard rhythmic pounding, like someone hammering on something hard. The neighbor almost went over to check, but they thought Victoria was hanging pictures or doing a craft project.,

The pounding stopped and started for over two hours, and the neighbor got used to it. Then at 3:30, they heard a massive cracking noise that shook their whole house, followed by a huge crash, and then silence. They called 911.

I imagined Victoria swinging that sledgehammer for hours, taking breaks when her arms got tired, then starting again. My throat tightened as I thought about how someone could have stopped her if they’d just knocked on the door or if the neighbor had trusted their gut and checked on the noise. But nobody did, and she kept going until the ceiling fell on her.,

Detective Cruz called us again two days later with more bank records. Rebecca had given them permission to look at her credit card statements, probably thinking it would clear things up. Instead, they found that Rebecca’s card was used to buy the vanity, LED strips, and sledgehammer from the same hardware store over three weeks.