My 17-year-old stepson usually stays with us on weekends. Lately, though, my 14-year-old daughter had started pleading with me to stop him from coming over. She wouldn’t give a clear reason—just kept insisting that she didn’t feel comfortable with him around anymore.

One afternoon, while collecting laundry from the guest room he used, I noticed a strange pile of socks tucked beside the bed. When I moved them, I found something that gave me pause: a photo of our whole family, along with one of my daughter’s old school pictures and a handmade card she’d once given her father. Nothing about it was outright threatening, but it was unsettling. These weren’t his things, and he’d never shown much interest in family keepsakes before.

When I brought it up to my husband, he shrugged it off, saying maybe his son was just feeling nostalgic or trying to feel connected. But something about how the items had been gathered—silently and secretly—stuck with me. And given my daughter’s unease, I couldn’t ignore it.

So I gently pressed her again. This time, she admitted that he hadn’t done anything she could name, but that he made her feel uncomfortable—staring too long, asking strange questions about “what life was like before he came.” It wasn’t anything concrete, but it was enough. I told my husband his son needed to stay elsewhere until we figured out what was really going on.