The floorboards groaned under my weight as I crept toward the kitchen at 3 a.m., my throat parched. I noticed a sliver of light bleeding from Sarah’s room. My daughter, a high school senior, had been buried in college applications lately, but this was late even for her. Pushing the door open, I found her slumped over her mahogany desk, her cheek pressed against an open textbook. Her iPhone lay face-up on the blotter, the screen glowing intensely in the dark room.
I smiled softly, remembering the years I’d carry her small, limp body to bed after she fell asleep watching cartoons. She looked so peaceful, yet exhausted. As I reached down to gently lift the phone to plug it into its charger, the display refreshed. It wasn’t a college portal or a social media feed. It was a high-resolution surveillance stream from a doorbell camera. My heart did a slow, painful somersault as I recognized the grainy porch. It was our house. But the timestamp was from twenty minutes ago.
In the video, a man in a dark hoodie stood just outside our front door. He wasn’t trying to break in. He was holding a stack of envelopes and a locksmith’s toolkit. Then, Sarah’s thumb—even in her sleep—must have twitched, scrolling the chat window below the video. A message from an unsaved number popped up: “The locks are changed, and the paperwork is filed. He’s inside. Move to Phase 2.” My breath hitched. My husband, Mark, was supposed to be on a business trip in Chicago. I spun around to look at the hallway, my mind racing. If Mark was gone, who was “he”? I looked back at Sarah’s sleeping face, which suddenly felt like the mask of a stranger. My hand trembled as I swiped up on her phone, bypassing the lock screen she had apparently disabled for this specific night. I opened her gallery and felt the blood drain from my face. There were hundreds of photos of me—sleeping, driving, at work—all captioned with timestamps and my daily routine. Just as I went to wake her, a heavy, rhythmic thud echoed from the attic directly above us.
“Mom?” Sarah’s voice was suddenly sharp, wide awake. She wasn’t looking at me with love; she was looking at the phone in my hand with a cold, calculated fury I had never seen before. “You weren’t supposed to find that until morning
