“How old?”
“The earliest activation record we recovered is about fourteen months ago.”
Natalie had moved into my house eight months earlier.
“So she was watching us before she lived here.”
“Possibly.”
He turned a laptop toward me.
“We also recovered data from one of the storage cards.”
There were dozens of clips.
Some were ordinary.
Laura making breakfast.
Sophie playing.
Me leaving for work.
Then one recording appeared dated three weeks before Laura died.
Laura was sitting in my study.
She was alive.
Seeing her move again almost broke me.
She was arguing with someone beyond the camera.
A woman stepped into view.
Natalie.
I grabbed the edge of the table.
Natalie had told me she barely saw Laura during the final months of her life.
Yet here she was inside my house.
Laura stood.
“You need to stop coming here.”
Natalie said something too quiet to hear.
Laura shook her head.
“No. I know what you’re doing.”
Natalie moved closer.
Laura didn’t back away.
“You don’t get to build a life out of somebody else’s.”
The recording ended abruptly.
I looked at Detective Marsh.
“What was she talking about?”
“We don’t know.”
But I did know one thing.
Natalie had lied from the beginning.
That night, Sophie told me something else.
She was lying beside me with Felix under her arm when she pointed at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling.
“Mommy said the biggest one was special.”
Laura had decorated Sophie’s ceiling when she was two.
I pulled over a chair and checked the largest silver star.
Behind it was a tiny folded note.
Three words.
LOOK INSIDE FELIX.
My hands started shaking.
I turned the stuffed fox over.
A seam beneath its tail looked newer than the rest.
I carefully opened it.
Inside the stuffing was a brass key wrapped in plastic.
No label.
No explanation.
Only a small paper tag with a number.
The next morning, I showed it to Detective Marsh.
He recognized the number format.
A storage facility across town used three-digit locker numbers.
Locker 317 was registered to Laura.
Inside were three boxes.
The first contained photographs.
Natalie outside Sophie's preschool.
Natalie near our house.