the wall while the rain beat a manic tattoo against the windowpane, listening to the faint, muffled creak of the floorboards upstairs as Evan eventually crept back into our bedroom around 4:00 AM, sliding in beside me and pretending to be fast asleep.
I didn’t confront him. I didn’t scream, and I didn’t shake him awake. Something in my survival instinct had locked into place, warning me that if I tipped my hand too early, if Evan realized I was onto him, the mask would slip entirely and I wouldn’t know what kind of monster was hiding beneath it.
The next morning, while Evan was at work and Emma was at school, I drove forty minutes across town to a specialty electronics store tucked into a strip mall next to a laundromat.
I bought a micro-surveillance camera—a tiny, matte-black cube no larger than a die, equipped
