Chapter 3 - Vanessa Had Been In Love With Daniel For Years
There was no normal explanation for what Vanessa screamed before she grabbed Noah.
Daniel was her older cousin.
Their families had been close since childhood, although not so close that they grew up in the same home. Daniel’s father and Vanessa’s mother were siblings, and holidays, ski trips, weddings, and summer gatherings put the cousins together often enough that everyone assumed the relationship between them was ordinary family affection.
For Daniel, it was.
For Vanessa, eventually, it wasn’t.
No one knew exactly when the boundary changed in her mind.
Emma later found messages suggesting the obsession had been building for years.
Vanessa compared every boyfriend to Daniel.
She asked mutual friends how Daniel’s marriage was going.
When Daniel and Emma argued, Vanessa always seemed to know.
She appeared at the estate more often after disagreements.
She complimented Daniel in ways Emma once dismissed as irritating but harmless.
“You always deserved someone who understood you.”
“Emma doesn’t appreciate how hard you work.”
“You were happier before marriage made everything complicated.”
Daniel brushed those comments aside.
To him, Vanessa was his younger cousin being overly familiar and slightly dramatic.
Emma felt differently.
She disliked how Vanessa touched Daniel’s sleeve while talking.
How she found excuses to sit beside him.
How she watched Emma when Daniel showed affection to his wife.
But whenever Emma raised it, Daniel responded with the same reasonable-sounding defense.
“She’s my cousin.”
Exactly.
That was why Emma eventually stopped mentioning it.
The idea felt so inappropriate that even saying it made her sound jealous of something that should have been impossible.
Vanessa benefited from that discomfort.
She could behave in ways that would have alarmed Emma immediately if she were a coworker or neighbor, because family relation made everyone search for a less disturbing explanation.
Then, six months before the gallery attack, Vanessa started doing something else.
She began trying to make Daniel believe Emma was becoming unstable.
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That was when obsession became strategy.
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