Chapter 4 - The Camera He Forgot
The only witness to the night my husband denied existed was a camera he'd forgotten my father built.
Harrow Medical had begun as a small company producing home monitors for premature infants. Months before my father died, he'd given me one of the earliest wireless prototypes. Marcus and I had placed it in the upstairs room we hoped would someday become a nursery. After I got pregnant, I plugged it back in.
Unlike our security system, the prototype didn't use Marcus's account. It uploaded motion clips to an old development server registered in my father's name — a server that was supposed to have been shut down. It wasn't.
Teresa and I searched thousands of archived files until we found the folder from May eighteenth.
At 12:41 a.m., the camera caught the empty nursery door opening. A man passed through the hallway, face turned away, image dark, but wearing a long coat with rain glistening across the shoulders. Two minutes later, I appeared behind him. At 4:09 a.m., the man crossed the hallway again, raising his left hand to adjust his collar. The metal around his wrist caught the camera's infrared light.
I paused the recording. Marcus owned a silver watch with a dark blue face and a distinctive broken link near the clasp — a fifth-anniversary gift from my father, only two hundred ever made. The broken link was visible in the video.
"That's him," I said.
"It strongly suggests it's him," Teresa corrected. "But his lawyer will say the image is too poor for positive identification."
"Then we make him explain it."
I sent Marcus one frozen frame. He called within thirty seconds.
"Where did you get that?"
"You recognize the watch."
"I recognize a blurry photograph."
"You came home that night."
"You can't see that man's face."
"He's wearing your coat and your watch."
"Neither item is unique."
"The watch was a limited edition."
"So?"
His calmness frightened me more than anger would have.
"You deleted the main security footage five minutes after this recording," I said.
"You're building a fantasy because you don't want to admit what you did."
"Why would I invent a night with my own husband?"
"To give another man's baby my name."
My fingers tightened around the phone. "Marcus, did you already know about the second pregnancy?"
For the first time, he hesitated. Only a breath. But I heard it.
"I knew nothing until the ultrasound."
"Then why did Bianca download our postnuptial agreement three weeks before the appointment?"
Silence.
"Marcus?"
"Stop contacting my employees."
"She isn't just your employee, is she?"
He didn't answer. Instead, a notification landed in my email — his attorney's formal demand that I preserve all medical records and consent to prenatal paternity testing. Attached: a sworn statement from Marcus claiming he'd remained in Chicago continuously from May twelfth through July seventh. Below his signature, a second name — Bianca Reyes, witness.
"She's giving him an alibi," Teresa said.
I looked again at the blurred man on the nursery camera. Marcus's face couldn't be seen, but something protruded from his coat pocket — white cardboard with a dark diagonal stripe. I enlarged the frame. Grainier, but a small symbol appeared in one corner of the card.
Teresa stared at it. "That isn't a passenger boarding pass."
May you like
"What is it?"
"It's an airport employee badge."
