The first one showed the lobby at 3:47 AM, empty except for the plant moving slightly in the draft from the heating vent. The second was exam room two at 6:22 AM: just the tail end of the cleaning crew's vacuum cord swinging into frame.
I shook my head. Definitely needed to dial back the sensitivity.
I was about to close the window when something caught my eye. A handful of prep room alerts clustered together, all timestamped around eleven or later on the same night, four days ago.
Probably nothing. Maybe Angela had come back one night to grab something she'd forgotten, or the motion sensors were picking up the glow from the parking lot lights again.
Still, I was already here.
I clicked on one of the notifications. 11:34 PM.
The video player opened, frozen on the first frame.
I pressed play.
Grainy black-and-white footage filled the screen, the timestamp ticking in the corner.
The prep room was empty for a few seconds, then the door opened and Angela walked in. She looked rough even in the low-quality footage—shoulders hunched, movements jerky. She went straight for the cabinet where I kept the cleaning supplies and reached behind the bottles and spray cans, pulling out a wine bottle I’d never seen before. I’d thought the tiny bottle on her desk was bad enough. Apparently that was just the tip of the iceberg.
She took a long drink straight from the bottle, then sank down to sit on the floor with her back against the exam table.
My chest tightened. Poor Angela. Whatever was going on with her, it was worse than I'd thought.
I pressed my lips together. It felt wrong to watch her fall apart in private like this, to see her at her lowest when she clearly thought she was alone.
My hand moved toward the mouse.
Then Angela stood up abruptly and crossed to the door. She opened it and stepped back, and someone else entered the frame.
A man. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a uniform.
I frowned. Had she called the police? Was something wrong? Was she?—
He stepped fully into the light.
The air left my lungs.
Matt.
My husband was in the prep room of the clinic at 11:34 at night, four days ago, with Angela.
They were talking. No audio, just grainy black-and-white footage of two people standing close. Angela gestured with her hands. Matt shook his head, rubbed the back of his neck the way he did when he was stressed.
He was helping her. That was it. That had to be it. Angela was upset and she'd called him because Matt was good at this, at talking people through hard things, at showing up when someone needed him. That's what he did. That's who he was. I was the one seeing things that weren't there, reading too much into footage that probably had a perfectly reasonable explanation if I just gave him a chance to?—
Angela reached for him.
And then they were kissing.
CHAPTER 2: ELENA
Iwas on the bathroom floor when my body finally caught up to what my brain had seen.
The tile was cold against my knees, and I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, tasting bile and something sharper. Maybe it was panic. Or, maybe, the metallic tang of a life breaking apart.
I didn't remember getting here. One moment I'd been staring at the screen, watching my husband kiss another woman, and the next I was here, heaving into the toilet like my body was trying to purge the last ten minutes from existence.
It didn't work.
