1. The system glitched.
2. She put it there herself.
3. Someone else is in the building.
Someone who knows how to move without being seen.
The thought lands in my chest like a knife.
I shut the laptop and set it aside.
Walk to the bedroom door.
I knock once.
“Raven?”
Silence.
A pause.
Then her voice. “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
Another pause.
“…Yeah.”
But her tone has an edge. Fragile. Focused elsewhere.
I don’t ask again.
I go back to the laptop, but I don’t sit.
Instead, I open the system logs for a deeper trace—motion heat maps, camera disconnects, unauthorised bandwidth usage.
And there it is.
A blip.
A faint network handshake from an unregistered device, three minutes after she left the bathroom.
It piggybacked on my security signal. Slipped inside. Masked itself as part of the camera sync.
One spike. One minute.
Just enough to send something.
