Chapter 9 - THE CAMERA IN THE NURSERY
The monitor company helped us remove the account.
But Rachel wanted the access logs preserved first.
The login times went back weeks.
Some happened while I was home alone.
Some happened while I was breastfeeding.
Some happened late at night after my husband claimed to be asleep beside me.
I tried not to imagine him watching.
The nursery camera had audio.
That meant he could have heard phone calls.
He could have heard conversations with my sister.
He could have heard me crying.
The feeling of being watched followed me for days.
I checked windows.
Corners.
Smoke detectors.
Chargers.
The shelter advocate told me that hypervigilance after violence was common.
I didn’t care what it was called.
I only cared that my son and I stayed alive.
Police searched the house again with my permission.
They found no additional cameras.
But they found something else.
A small tracking device taped beneath the passenger seat of my car.
The same car whose keys had disappeared.
Officer Daniels called me personally.
“Do you recognize it?”
“No.”
“Did you install any vehicle tracker?”
“No.”
“Did your husband have access to the car?”
“Every day.”
The device was registered through a family account.
His email address was attached.
My knees went weak.
I had spent months wondering how he always knew where I had been.
How he knew I stopped at my sister’s house even when I hadn’t mentioned it.
How he knew I had stayed ten minutes late after a prenatal appointment.
He had called it intuition.
I had called it possessiveness.
Neither word was accurate.
It was surveillance.
Rachel added the evidence to our case.
The prosecutor’s office added another note to theirs.
Then Melissa contacted my attorney.
This time she didn’t send a message.
She sent documents.
Screenshots.
Dozens of them.
My husband telling her I was mentally unstable.
My husband telling her he planned to leave immediately after the baby arrived.
My husband saying his mother would help him “handle the house.”
And one message, sent two weeks before my delivery, that made my entire body go cold.
Once she has the baby, she’ll be too exhausted to fight anything.
Melissa had replied.
Fight what?
May you like
My husband answered.
Everything.
