I never considered myself a paranoid person nor did I ever imagine I would need to turn my home into a high tech fortress. My name is Riley and for the last year my husband Luke and I had been building what we thought was a sanctuary. Our house was far from perfect with its creaking floors and slightly tilted hallways but it was ours. We spent our weekends training our golden retriever Scout and planting tomatoes in the backyard dreaming of the day we would eventually fill a nursery. It was a home meant for warmth and safety until my sister in law Sheryl decided to turn our private haven into her personal stage for espionage. Sheryl lived only three doors down and on the surface she was the neighborhood icon. She had the perfect SUV the perfect hair and a toddler named Macy who looked like she stepped out of a catalog. But behind that Pinterest perfect smile was a woman who never truly left the competitive hallways of high school.
When we first bought our home Sheryl joked that we had stolen her dream house and when I received a promotion she made sure to remind me how nice it must be to not have a child to care for. But the real shift happened after I suffered a devastating miscarriage at sixteen weeks. While Luke and my mother helped me through the wreckage of my grief Sheryl became a ghost eventually resurfacing not with support but with a strategy. She began sending three year old Macy over to our house almost every day under the guise of letting her play with Scout. I loved Macy she was a quiet gentle child who seemed to take up as little space as possible. However I soon noticed a strange pattern. Macy stopped knocking at the front door and began crawling in through the doggy door. I laughed it off at first as a cute toddler quirk but then Sheryl started knowing things she couldn’t possibly know.
Sheryl began making comments about private conversations I had only had with Luke or even thoughts I had spoken aloud to an empty room. She knew about my sore throat and my craving for ginger tea. She knew about a specific box of yearbooks I was looking for in the attic for Lukes upcoming birthday. The anxiety began to gnaw at me. I asked Luke if he had been sharing our private business with his sister and while he admitted they talked occasionally he was just as baffled as I was. Then the situation took a far more serious turn. We had been stashing cash in an old cookie tin above the fridge about fifteen thousand dollars we were saving for our future. One morning I reached up to check our progress and found the tin completely empty. There was no forced entry and no mess just a heavy suffocating silence.
I initially suspected Luke but his genuine shock mirrored my own. We realized someone had been in our house without our knowledge. That afternoon when Macy arrived I stayed in the hallway and watched her. She didn’t knock she just scurried through the doggy door like a well trained operative. As she stood up I noticed a shiny silver disc attached to the strap of her pink overalls. It looked like a decorative button but it was too cold and too perfectly round. When I inspected it I realized it wasn’t a button at all it was a sophisticated camera lens. I felt my blood turn to ice as I realized Sheryl was using her own daughter as a mobile listening and recording device. Luke and I stayed up all night watching the shaky footage from the microSD card hidden inside the device. It was a digital record of our private lives recorded through the eyes of a three year old.
The betrayal was so deep that it felt like a physical weight. Sheryl had turned her own flesh and blood into a spy to satisfy her jealousy and greed. The next morning we decided to set a trap. I stood in the kitchen and spoke loudly about moving the rest of our money to a red toolbox in the detached garage claiming we didn’t feel safe keeping it in the house anymore. Macy was nearby petting Scout seemingly oblivious but I knew the camera was catching every word. We waited in the darkness of our bedroom and at exactly one in the morning the motion sensors near the garage flared to life. Scout let out a low growl and we watched the outdoor feed on my phone. There she was Sheryl dressed in black with a flashlight in her hand.
