“Daddy, my new mom is acting strange. She comes into my room at night,” my 7-year-old daughter Lily whispered during dinner.

At first, I thought it was just her imagination.

Clara had moved in six months earlier. She really tried to be a good stepmom, but she had one habit that sometimes went too far — she was obsessed with keeping the house perfectly organized.

So when my daughter said the guest room upstairs was suddenly off limits, I assumed Clara was just cleaning or sorting things.

But over the next two weeks, small things started feeling off.

One night around 2 a.m., I woke up and saw Clara quietly carrying heavy black trash bags out the back door.

A few days later, she installed a lock on the guest room.

Whenever I asked what she was doing up there, she just smiled and said she was “working on a project.”

Then one evening I saw something that made me stop in the hallway.

Clara was quietly leaving my daughter’s bedroom.

She looked around like she didn’t want anyone to see her.

In her hand was a small lock of hair.

Before I could ask what she was doing, my daughter suddenly started crying.

She ran into the hallway and told me the box under her bed was gone.

It was the one place where she kept the last things that belonged to her mom — a few sweaters, a scarf, and the tiny outfit she wore as a baby.

Furious, I went straight upstairs and opened the guest room door.

“Clara!” I shouted.

She was sitting on the floor, cutting my late wife’s clothes into tiny pieces.

Gray cashmere squares. Pieces of a scarf. Sleeves carefully cut from old sweaters.

For a moment, all I could think was that she had destroyed the last things my daughter had from her mother.