He pushes off the shelf and walks away, not sparing me another glance.
35
SEBASTIAN
I’m such a fucking idiot.
I take off my glasses and pinch the bridge of my nose. One single check box, that’s all it would have taken. A single box checked in the security software I installed, and the system would have recognized and catalogued every instance of someone entering and leaving the camera view by Sydney’s door.
One single missed check box.
The box is checked now, and a few lines of code added were enough to set up a new alert, pinging me on my phone whenever a person comes into view.
But now I have hours andfucking hoursworth of video footage to scrub through manually.
I start with last night, when she unlocked the door for me, stopping momentarily to palm my erection at the memory. I speed through the footage until I see myself walk up her stairs and disappear.
You can’t see her door. Another idiotic fucking mistake, one I made intentionally to protect her privacy. One that makes me want to tear the camera off the roof with my bare hands and change the placement. I send a quick message to the team I sent to install it, instructing them to correct the positioning as soonas possible, and they message back almost immediately to let me know it’ll be done within the hour.
Maybe I should have put a camera in the damn apartment after all.
Fuck. I close my eyes and let myself imagine what it would be like to have a tape of our time together. I have to adjust myself in my pants at the thought. Later, I promise myself. The next time I have her.
The video footage is set to 4x speed, but I tap my keyboard and speed through even faster. I watch. And watch. And watch.
And at just past five in the morning, I see myself appear and walk down the stairs, flowers in hand.
What the fuck?
I rewatch the footage again, slower.
I walk up the stairs.
I walk down them.
And in between, no one else appears. Between those two events, no one goes up her stairs to deliver a bouquet of lilies, no one walks through the parking lot behind her shop. But somehow, they show up at her door.
When I call my security guy, I don’t bother with hellos.
“How hard would it be to alter the footage from those cameras you installed?” I ask.
“Almost impossible,” they answer. “Why?”
My molars hurt from clenching them so hard. “Who could do it?”
“A securities expert,” they venture, in a tone that makes me think they’re guessing. “Someone with top-notch coding experience.”
Someone like Jade’s brother, Justin.
Two possibilities exist here. One, someone hacked my system, a system almost impossible to hack. Two, someonesomehowbypassed the security system without showing up onmy camera, and the only way that could be is if they were walking from the direction of the empty unit next door. A blind spot on my camera feed.
I sit back in my computer chair and rub my eyes, imagining all the ways I would take this faceless man apart, piece by piece, in our wet lab.
I try to search through previous video files, looking for him. If someone is staying in that unit, the fucker has to leave eventually, right? Has to go to work, has to go out, has to meet friends.
It takes me almost a full day of searching before I findone fucking image of him.
A dark gray sweatshirt, hood pulled up, non-descript jeans. He’s carrying a paper bag full of groceries. He reaches the top of the stairs and disappears.
