Here is the continuation and conclusion of the story:
My hands trembled as I handed the note to my husband, Mark. “What did we take? We haven’t even been here!”
Mark’s jaw clenched. “Check the doorbell camera. The battery usually lasts a few weeks.”
We huddled around his phone, scrolling back through the footage. We saw our departure, the quiet days of the empty porch, and then—Christmas Eve. A figure stormed onto our porch. It wasn’t a stranger. It was Sarah, the young mom from next door. The one I’d brought cookies to just last month when she moved in.
On the screen, she was sobbing, hurling eggs with a frantic, terrifying rage before shoving the paper under the door.
“Stay here with the kids,” Mark said, his voice low.
“No,” I said, grabbing my coat. “I need to know.”
We walked next door. The lights were on. I pounded on the door, holding the note. Sarah opened it, her eyes red and swollen. When she saw me, her face twisted into a snarl.
“You have the nerve to show up here?” she spat. “My son woke up to nothing because of you!”
“Sarah, stop!” I shouted over her. “We’ve been on an island for a week! Look at our tan lines! We just got home to a house covered in eggs. What on earth do you think we took?”
“The package!” she screamed. ” The delivery confirmation showed it on your porch because the driver mixed up the numbers! I came over to get it, and it was gone! You saw it, you took it inside, and you stole my son’s limited-edition gaming console!”
The silence that followed was heavy.
“Sarah,” Mark said calmly. “We haven’t been inside our house in seven days. If the package isn’t there…”
He turned and walked back toward our egg-covered porch. Sarah and I followed. Mark walked past the front door, around the side where our large recycling bins sat behind the decorative hedges.
He lifted the lid of the blue bin.
There, resting on top of a stack of cardboard, was a brown box with a label facing up.
“The driver…” Mark murmured. “He must have hidden it in the bin to keep it safe from porch pirates, but he didn’t leave a note.”
Sarah froze. The color drained from her face. She looked from the box, to the egg-splattered walls of my house, and finally to me. She covered her mouth, a fresh wave of tears spilling over—this time from shame.
“I… I was so angry,” she whispered. “It was the only thing he wanted. I thought you…”
“You thought the worst of us,” I said, the adrenaline fading into exhaustion.
Sarah spent the next four hours scrubbing our siding and power-washing our porch until midnight. We didn’t press charges, but things were never quite the same. The eggs washed off, but the trust? That was harder to clean.
Christmas is about giving, but that year, I learned how quickly people are willing to take away your peace.
