"Okay."
I cross the room and open the door and nearly drop my phone.
Chapter 47: Cody
Sheopensthedoor,and her face does three things in under a second.
Surprise. Recognition. Fear.
Not the polite kind. Not the startled kind you feel when someone knocks unexpectedly. The fear of someone who has something to hide and has just opened the door to the person they're hiding it from.
She doesn't relax when she sees me.
That tells me everything I need to know about how today went.
This morning started early.
I drove to her parents' house at seven — not to see her parents, they weren't there, they're never there on weekends, a fact I know because I've been dating their daughter for two years and have learned their rhythms. The housekeeper let me in because she knows my face. I said I needed to grab something in Adela's room, and she waved me through.
I found all three cameras in two minutes.
One in the smoke detector above her desk. One in the vent above her bed. One in the small carved wooden frame on her dresser that I bought for her.
I removed them carefully, put them in my jacket pocket, and left the way I came.
Back at my father's house, I set up my new laptop on the desk in my room and spent the next few hours going through the footage.
It's a lot.
Weeks of it. Day by day, night by night, the mundane recorded life of a girl who had no idea she was being watched in her own bedroom. I skip through most of it — her at her desk studying, her on the phone, her sleeping. Normal. Everything normal.
And then I find it.
Early morning hours. The timestamp reads 2:47 AM. The room is dark, and I almost skip past it because it looks like nothing, like every other night, like a girl asleep in her bed.
Then the door opens.
I sit forward.
A figure. Another one. Another one. Three all dressed in black with masks on. I watch them search her room, but one crosses it and stops beside her bed. He stands there looking down at her while she sleeps.
I pause the footage.
I lean in close to the screen.
The posture.
I know that posture. I know the specific way those shoulders sit, the way that body distributes its weight when it's standing still. I have skated beside that posture. I have stood in locker rooms beside it, sat in film sessions beside it.
Bastard.
The footage is dark and grainy. The figure is wearing all black, but it doesn't matter. I know exactly who is standing over my sleeping girlfriend.
The heat moves through all at once — up from my stomach, into my chest, behind my eyes, the burning liquid rage of something that has been simmering since I woke up in a hospital bed and remembered every second of the night that put me there.
He put me in a coma.
And then he went into her room while she slept.
