Chapter 2: The Cameras That Never Fail
I didn't pick up the drawing right away.
It lay flat on the dark table exactly where I'd set it down, my left hand still resting on the edge. The six little bottle shapes Ellie had shaded in colored pencil stared up at me, and that crooked clock face with the hands pointing at 8:12. The orange bottle and its white cap sat in the foreground, catching the window light. Behind me I could feel Victor in the hallway, not moving.
Ellie was still standing at the corner of the table.
"Hey, bug," I said, and my voice was lower than I meant it to be. "Go on in the living room with Maria for a little bit, okay? I need to talk grown-up stuff with Mr. Victor."
She nodded. She didn't ask why. She just slipped her hand off the paper and let Maria, who'd been hovering by the kitchen doorway since she heard Ellie's voice get quiet, guide her away. Maria gave me a quick look over Ellie's head. I shook my head once, just enough. She understood and kept walking until the soft sound of the cartoon Maria always put on filled the back of the house.
Victor hadn't come back into the dining room. He was still in that bright hallway, his hands at his sides, watching.
"I need to check the system," I said to him. "Since you mentioned the cameras."
He didn't answer, just tilted his chin. Like he was giving me permission in my own house.
The security closet was off the mudroom, a narrow room my father had built in when he wired the whole place. Rack on the left, a small monitor on the wall, the DVR humming low underneath. The air in there was always cooler. I pulled the door shut behind me, not all the way, and woke the monitor with a tap.
The timeline across the bottom was a solid green bar for the last seven days, except for one hard black gap. I felt my heart do that uneven thump it does when I miss a dose, then felt myself breathe through it.
I dragged the cursor to this morning. 08:00 green. 08:05 green. 08:09 the bar cut to black and stayed black. 08:17 it snapped back to green. Eight minutes. Right in the middle sat 8:12.
I clicked into the system log. White text on black.
08:09:14 USER ADMIN_1 - SYSTEM DISARM - MANUAL
08:17:03 USER ADMIN_1 - SYSTEM RE-ARM - MANUAL
Not power loss. Not network error. Manual disarm.
Only two people had ADMIN_1. Me and Victor. My father had set it that way three years ago. He'd said, "You don't give that code to anyone who doesn't live here." Victor had lived here in the guest wing since the partnership dissolved.
My hand was on the mouse and I realized my finger tattoos were shaking slightly. I made myself take in air slowly, the way the cardiologist taught me.
I pulled my phone out and called Sentinel.
It rang twice. A woman answered, "Sentinel Security, this is Karen."
"Karen, it's Daniel Reyes at 44 Ridge Road. Can you pull my health check from this morning?"
"Of course, Mr. Reyes. Give me one second."
I listened to her typing. Through the cracked door I could hear Victor's shoes on the hardwood. He hadn't followed me, but he hadn't moved away either.
She came back. "I show your system reported normal all morning. No power loss, no offline event. Last manual event was an arm at 11:47 last night and then a disarm at 8:09 this morning, re-arm at 8:17. Both manual with the admin code. Is everything okay at the house?"
"Yeah," I said. "Just double checking. Thanks, Karen."
"If you had an outage we would have gotten an alert," she added. "We didn't get anything."
I thanked her again and hung up.
That was it. It wasn't a failure. Someone had typed the code and turned the eyes off. On purpose, for eight minutes, around the exact time my five-year-old said his hand was on my medicine.
I stood there another ten seconds staring at that black gap. Every instinct I had wanted to walk straight out to the hallway and ask him to his face why he'd used my code at 8:09. But Ellie was in the next room, and Maria would hear, and if I was wrong about anything — if I made a scene and had nothing but a child's drawing and a log entry Victor could explain away — I'd lose any chance to prove what happened to that bottle.
I set the monitor back to live view, closed the log, and stepped out.
Victor was now leaning against the doorframe to the dining room, arms crossed over his black shirt. His tie hadn't moved.
"Everything good?" he asked.
"Camera glitch," I said. It was the first lie I'd told him in a long time and it felt thin in my mouth. "Looks like it kicked off for a few minutes this morning. I'm going to have them come look."
He watched my face for a beat too long. "Probably the update. It does that."
"Probably."
I walked past him into the dining room. The drawing was still there. So was the orange bottle and the little white cap. I picked up the paper carefully by the edges, folded it once the way Ellie had folded it when she brought it to me, and slid it inside the inside pocket of my blazer, against my chest. Then I picked up the bottle, screwed the white cap back on tight, and slipped it into my front pants pocket. I could feel its shape against my leg.
Victor's eyes tracked every move. He didn't stop me.
"I'm going to keep these with me," I said, keeping my voice even. "Ellie's art. You know how she is."
May you like
He nodded once. "She's a good kid. Observant."
The way he said observant made the back of my neck go cold, but I didn't let it show. I just left my hand on my blazer for a second, feeling the paper there, and started planning how I was going to count those pills without anyone seeing me do it.
