Chapter 5 - Someone Had Been Watching
Ryan unplugged every indoor camera before midnight.
I changed the smart-home password from my phone while he reset the router.
Then I changed the email password connected to the security account.
Then the cloud-storage password.
Then the code to the front door.
Every time I finished one account, I wondered how many more pieces of our home Linda could reach from outside it.
Ryan paced through the kitchen with the wild energy of someone trying to repair thirty years in thirty minutes.
"She shouldn't have had access."
"You keep saying that."
"Because I don't understand it."
"Did she know your old passwords?"
"Some of them."
"Then that's how."
"I changed them after we got married."
"Did you reuse any?"
Ryan stopped pacing.
His silence answered me.
I almost screamed.
Instead, I opened the security app's activity log.
There were dozens of logins from Linda's device during the week she had stayed with us.
Some lasted seconds.
Others lasted more than an hour.
She had accessed the nursery camera at 2:11 a.m.
3:42 a.m.
5:06 a.m.
She had watched me feed Noah.
She had watched me rock him.
She had watched me fall asleep in the nursery chair with him safely in the crib beside me.
My skin crawled.
"Why would she watch us in the middle of the night?"
Ryan looked sick.
"I don't know."
I scrolled farther.
The kitchen camera had been accessed repeatedly whenever Ryan and I argued.
The living room camera had been viewed the afternoon Noah got his first round of vaccines and cried for two hours.
Linda had not even been staying with us then.
She had watched from her house.
"This started before this week."
Ryan came around the table.
"How far back?"
"At least two months."
He swore under his breath.
I kept scrolling.
Then I saw a setting I did not recognize.
AUTO-DELETE LOCAL CLIPS AFTER 24 HOURS.
The option had been enabled six days earlier.
By Linda's account.
"Ryan."
He leaned over my shoulder.
"What?"
I showed him.
His face hardened.
"She was deleting recordings."
"Or making sure they wouldn't stay here."
"The cloud might still have them."
I opened the archive.
Most clips from that afternoon were missing.
There was footage from 2:03 p.m.
Then nothing until 3:18 p.m.
The incident happened around 2:40.
"She deleted it."
Ryan pressed both hands to the back of his neck.
"Maybe the camera went offline."
"Stop."
"I'm just saying we don't know."
"We know her account changed the delete settings."
"Yes."
"We know she had live access."
"Yes."
"We know the only missing hour is the hour when she soaked Noah."
Ryan shut his mouth.
I searched the trash folder.
Empty.
Then I remembered something Elena at the hospital had told me.
Save any messages.
I took screenshots of every login and account change.
I emailed them to myself.
Then I sent copies to a new address Ryan did not know.
He watched me do it.
"You don't trust me."
"Not enough."
He nodded slowly.
"Fair."
That answer hurt more than an argument would have.
Before Noah woke, I took photographs of every page from the drawer and uploaded them to two separate cloud accounts.
Ryan watched without objecting.
Then he surprised me by placing the original flash drive into an envelope.
"Give this to Megan tomorrow."
"Why?"
"Because if Mom gets into the house, she can't destroy everything."
I looked at him.
"You think she would come back?"
"I think I underestimated her for thirty years."
He went to the front door and checked the deadbolt twice.
"I'm done assuming I know where the line is."
I wanted to ask why that realization had taken our son's scream to arrive.
Instead, I asked something else.
"Did she ever come into your room at night when you were little?"
Ryan turned.
"Why?"
"Because she watched Noah through the nursery camera at two and three in the morning."
His face tightened.
"Sometimes she'd stand in my doorway."
"Doing what?"
"Nothing."
"That doesn't sound like nothing."
"She'd just watch."
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"If I pretended to sleep, she'd leave."
"And if you were awake?"
"She'd ask what I was thinking about."
"What happened if you said Emily?"
Ryan looked away.
"She'd tell me dreams were not memories."
The sentence made me cold.
Linda had not merely corrected his story during formal interviews.
She had patrolled his memory at night.
I looked toward the unplugged kitchen camera.
The technology was new.
The behavior was not.
Watching.
Waiting.
Correcting the story before anyone else could hear it.
"Ryan."
"Yeah?"
"You need to write down everything you remember before talking to her again."
"Why?"
"Because every conversation with her seems to make you less certain afterward."
He thought about it.
Then he opened a blank document on his laptop.
He typed for nearly forty minutes without speaking.
When he finished, he saved three copies.
At 12:37 a.m., Noah woke crying.
Both Ryan and I moved at the same time.
Then we stopped.
He looked at me.
"Can I get his bottle?"
The question was careful.
Almost formal.
I nodded.
Ryan prepared the bottle exactly the way I had shown him a hundred times.
He tested the temperature against his wrist.
He handed it to me without asking to hold Noah.
I fed our son while Ryan sat on the floor several feet away.
For a few minutes, the house was quiet except for Noah swallowing.
Then Ryan spoke.
"I thought I was protecting you from something ugly."
I looked at him.
"You protected the ugly thing from me."
He lowered his eyes.
"I know."
"Why did you let Linda stay here?"
"Because you were exhausted."
"That is not an answer."
He rubbed his palms over his jeans.
"Because she kept saying she had changed."
"Still not an answer."
Ryan looked up.
"Because I wanted to believe I could have a normal family."
There it was.
Not logic.
Longing.
The most dangerous thing in the house had not been Linda's temper.
It had been Ryan's need to pretend his childhood could be repaired by giving his mother another baby to love correctly.
"You used Noah to test whether she had changed."
Ryan recoiled.
"No."
"That's what happened."
"I never thought of it like that."
"But that's what you did."
He stood and walked to the window.
"I hate myself enough already."
"Good."
He turned.
I surprised both of us with the word.
"Maybe you should hate what you did long enough to stop explaining it."
Ryan's face tightened.
I immediately regretted the cruelty.
I did not take it back.
Noah finished his bottle and fell asleep against my shoulder.
At 1:15 a.m., I moved a suitcase into the nursery.
Ryan watched from the doorway.
"Where are you going?"
"My sister's."
"Tonight?"
"In the morning."
"Sarah, please don't take him away from me."
I folded three sleepers and placed them in the suitcase.
"I'm taking him away from this house."
"It's our house."
"Your mother has been watching us through the cameras."
"I locked her out."
"Your mother has a history of hurting an infant."
"I know."
"You hid it."
"I know."
"And she called the police on me tonight."
Ryan leaned against the frame.
"I know."
"Then stop asking me to behave like nothing changed."
He looked at Noah's crib.
"Can I come with you?"
"No."
The answer broke something in his face.
"Why?"
"Because I need one night where I don't have to wonder which version of the truth you're giving me."
Ryan nodded.
He left the nursery without another word.
At 1:41 a.m., I received an email from an address I did not recognize.
The subject line contained only one word.
SARAH.
I almost deleted it as spam.
Then I saw the attachment name.
LIVINGROOM_1441.mp4.
My pulse jumped.
I opened the message.
There was one sentence.
She did not delete everything.
The sender was signed only T.H.
I stared at the initials.
Thomas Hart.
Ryan's father.
The man who had pancreatic cancer twelve years earlier.
The man Ryan believed was probably dead.
I opened the attachment.
The video began with our living room at 2:41 that afternoon.
Noah lay in the bassinet.
Linda stood over him.
The camera had captured everything.
She lifted the bottle.
She looked toward the kitchen to make sure I was gone.
Then she unscrewed the nipple.
My hand flew to my mouth.
She had not accidentally tipped a bottle while trying to feed him.
She had removed the top first.
Then she poured the milk deliberately over my baby's face.
Noah screamed.
Linda leaned closer.
The camera microphone caught her whisper.
"Now maybe you'll learn what happens when you don't listen."
I stopped the video.
My whole body was shaking.
I looked at the email again.
T.H.
I walked downstairs with my phone in my hand.
Ryan was sitting alone at the dining table, reading his father's letter again.
He looked up.
"What's wrong?"
I set the phone in front of him and played the video.
He watched without moving.
When it ended, he whispered one word.
"Jesus."
I opened the email header.
"Ryan."
He looked at the sender.
His face changed.
"No."
"Those are your father's initials."
"That doesn't mean it's him."
As if the sender could hear us, another email arrived.
This one had no attachment.
Only a phone number and a message.
Ryan, I am alive.
Your mother knows it.
May you like
And if Sarah wants to keep Noah safe, neither of you should trust what Linda does next.
