Private Window

The husband hired me to prove his wife was cheating. I didn’t expect her to be the only one innocent.

You learn to keep your voice low in my line of work. Not just in a hallway outside a hotel room or on a stairwell while you count the steps. Inside yourself. The private investigator who shouts in his head misses the small things. The blink of a light. The dip in a timestamp. The way someone looks at a doorknob like it’s an audience. Nobody pays for your opinions. They pay for the small things.

The husband’s name was Harold Briggs. Venture capitalist. He liked to flex his watchband as if checking the time were a brand new hobby. We sat in my office while the city breathed through the cracked window. He put his elbows on my desk and stared at the framed licenses with an appetite I didn’t care to name.

“My life,” he said, and let the word sit on his tongue for a beat too long.

“Name?”

“Clara.”

“Suspicious behavior?”

“She works late. New friends. New clothes.” He made a little show of embarrassment. “She’s been…difficult. Started painting again.” The way he said painting told me paint was no longer a color but a verdict.

“What do you want out of this?” I asked, because you always ask. People lie to themselves first. If they lie to you, at least you’ll get paid for the performance.

“Proof,” he said. “I want to know for sure.”

I took the retainer, signed the papers, let him talk. Big glass building. Penthouse. State-of-the-art smart home with cameras in all the regular places. I told him I wouldn’t go into the bedroom. He told me there were no cameras in the bedroom. I told him I’d need temporary admin on his home hub. He didn’t blink.

“I travel a lot,” he said. “I need to protect what’s mine.”

It used to be that investigations tasted like coffee and footsteps. You made friends with cabbies, bartenders, women who opened windows to smoke when they were alone. Now it tastes like screenshots and passwords, with all the same guilt and none of the air. The new keyholes glow. You peer with your thumb.

I got admin inside an hour. The house was a terrarium of moving parts. Kitchen cam. Living room cam. Office cam. Nursery cam nobody had bothered to disconnect. The baby was gone. The name tag still read “Luca” on the app. A little white cartoon bear smiled on the icon. People forget what the ghost of a child leaves behind.

I started watching. It feels worse than tailing, even when it’s legal, even when a smile like a receipt has waved his pen across the dotted lin and said please. It feels worse because a screen attracts a different sort of stare. You fix your eyes and the machine rewards you with motion, with the frictionless glide of someone else’s daily life.

Clara liked to cook. She set a burner too high and laughed at herself. She talked to a sister on speaker as she chopped. She turned down her music when the door staff called to say a delivery was up. She painted late, standing barefoot in front of a big blank canvas with her hair tied like a sailor’s knot. She didn’t meet anyone. She didn’t even go out much. If she was cheating, she was doing it with her own apartment.

I filed two updates to Briggs. Uneventful. Normal. He sent back the same sentence both nights. Keep watching.

I kept watching.

On the third night the hallway outside my door smelled like rain and old pizza. I was scrolling back through Clara’s feeds to the afternoon when the living room stamped a little hiccup I almost didn’t notice. Flicker. One frame of static. Then the room again. The timestamp read 2:17 am, which made no sense because it was only 11:53.

I scrubbed back slowly. Frame by frame is tedious work. It makes your eyes ache. I stopped at 2:16:59. The living room was empty. The painting she worked on leaned against a chair.

At 2:17:00 a man entered the frame. No one opened the door. He didn’t come from the hall. He was just there. A dark jacket and pants, clean shoes. Not expensive. Tidy. He walked across the living room without looking at anything and into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and stood with his hand on the door for a long time like he’d forgotten why he’d come.

“Who the hell,” I said, and felt ridiculous for talking to a recording.

He didn’t touch Clara. She wasn’t there. He closed the refrigerator and looked up at the camera. He smiled. It was a small smile. Not taunting. More like what you give a stranger in an elevator when your eyes accidentally meet.

Then the feed ended. Not like a clip. Like a string cut. The next frame jumped to 8:02 am. Clara came in with a mug of coffee. She set it down and hummed to herself and rubbed her eyes. No man.

I checked the logs. I checked them again. I ran packets. The file said it was recorded. It said it came from the living room cam. The time stamp was three days ahead. I didn’t call Briggs. I have some lines left, even if they are thin lines. Instead I wrote down the time, flagged the feed, and told myself I was tired.

The next day I sat in my office and opened the mail and pretended I couldn’t hear 2:17 ticking like a bad joke. At noon I made the mistake of opening the nursery camera. The little bear icon had been blinking all morning. It was probably a firmware update.

The room was clean and useless. White curtains. A rug with moons. A crib pushed into a corner. The camera sat in the far opposite corner. I watched for a while and then I forgot to breathe because for a second the crib seemed full. It was the movement more than the shape. The glitch of something swelling where nothing should be.

I closed the app. I set the phone face down on my desk. I waited. There’s that trick where you tell yourself you are not going to look, and the trick fails in four, three, two.

When I looked again the crib was empty. The crib was only a crib. I shook out my shoulders and told myself I believed in physics.

That night, Harold texted me twice. Keep watching. Then a second one. She plays innocent. I want the truth. I didn’t bother answering. If you answer men like that they think you’re listening.

I set an alarm for 2:15 am. I made coffee I didn’t want. At 2:16 I connected to the living room feed and watched the quiet. The quiet looked expensive. At exactly 2:17, the static hiccuped again. A breath. The man entered the room. Too smooth to be real and too ordinary to be fake.

He walked to the kitchen. He opened the fridge. He put his hand on the door. He didn’t look at the camera this time. He stared at his own reflection in the dark stainless steel. It gave me my first good angle on his face. He looked like anyone. That’s the scariest kind.

I took a photo. The app obliges. He never touched anything. He didn’t leave prints. He had the air of someone who had already been there and had already left and was only pausing in the middle to catch a breath.

He turned then, as if hearing a cue. He looked exactly at the camera. He tilted his head the smallest fraction. He smiled a little. He lifted his hand like a polite hello. Then the feed cut to morning again.

I replayed it three times. The timestamp still said three days ahead.

At nine the next morning I tried to call Briggs. He didn’t answer. I texted him. We need to talk. He sent back a thumbs-up emoji. I tried Clara’s sister, because I had the number. She answered on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“My name is Eddie Sloan. I work -”

“I know who you are,” she said. “Stop calling me.” She hung up.

I didn’t call back.

By afternoon, the nursery camera had a new notification. Motion detected. I hated that my pulse rose. I tapped the alert. The room was empty. The curtains hadn’t moved. The little bear in the app smiled anyway, and I wanted to throw my phone into the sea.

I watched the living room as if something in it had promised me an answer. The screen took on the feel of a door you can’t help pressing your ear against. Sometime after midnight, Calra came in and put two fingers to the mirrored glass of the patio door. She stood like that for a long time. Her mouth moved. I turned up the volume and got nothing. She walked into the hallway to the bedroom and then came back with a blanket and pillow.

At 1:40 am, the hallway camera caught Harold stepping out of the elevator. He wore the same suit from my first meeting. He let himself in, put his briefcase by the table and stood watching his wife sleep. He touched her ankle through the blanket. She woke with a sound that was a laugh and a flinch at the same time.

They argued without sound. She used her hands. He used a smile. I read lips only in a casual way, but I thought I caught sell and always and why are you recording me. He glanced at the camera then, right at me.

The living room feed jittered. One frame. Two. Then the man appeared behind Harold. Clara didn’t see him. Harold didn’t see him. The man looked at me as if checking the time. He raised his index finger. Not a threat. A teacher. Pay attention. The screen went black.

I moved without choosing to. Jacket on. Keys. Stairs instead of the elevator. The night air slapped me as I drove. The city’s veins were nearly empty.

I didn’t think about legality. I knew the door staff. I borrowed a voice that belonged to better men. The penthouse was a gallery of soft light and expensive wrongness. The mirrors weren’t right. The glass of the patio door wasn’t either.

“Hello?” I said out loud.

No answer. I tried the bedroom. Unmade bed. Two wine glasses in the sink. Cell phone on a charger in the office, face down. The nursery door was half closed. I put my hand on the frame before I looked in.

The nursery was neat. White curtains. Moon rug. Crib in the corner. The camera sat in its corner like a docile spider. The lens was pointed at the crib. The lens, I realized, was turned a quarter-inch too far inward. It faced the wall. The feed I’d watched should have been blank, and yet I had watched it.

When I stepped back into the living room, the screen in my jacket vibrated. The app alert read: Motion detected. Living room. The camera I was standing under showed me my own shoulders from high and behind.

I raised my head slowly toward the corner of the room. The camera sat there. I waved at it. The phone showed me waving at it.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay.”

On the screen, behind me, someone entered the frame.

I turned. There was nobody. The screen insisted there was. He was several feet behind me, exactly where you feel someone in a crowded subway car and pretend you don’t. He looked at the back of my head the way a reader looks at a page. The man. The anyone. The small smile.

“Who are you,” I asked and my voice came out low because anything louder would have felt like begging.

He didn’t answer. The screen went black.

I left. The next day I called Harold from a park bench and told him we needed to meet. He said he was out of town. I said where. He said meetings. I said the footage isn’t right. He laughed like a cough and told me to keep watching.

At noon, local news posted a brief. A woman missing. A man missing. No signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle. Friends and family concerned. I stared at their photographs.

The police called me around three. They knew my name, it had been found in an admin log. We talked. I told them what I could without sounding like a man who whispers to screens. They asked for my files. I sent them the clips. I stared at the spinning upload circle and wished to be a man who cared less.

A detective came to the office at six. Her hair pulled back. She sat where Harold had sat and asked me to play the clip of the man in the living room. I did. She watched without commentary.

“The time stamp,” I said. “It’s three days ahead.”

She nodded slowly. “You ever see a deepfake up close, Mr. Sloan?”

“I’ve seen people lie with pixels,” I said. “This doesn’t feel like that.”

“How does it feel, Mr. Sloan?”

“Like I’ve been watched back.”

“We’ll be in touch,” she said.

That night at 2:16 my phone warmed in my pocket like a small animal. The living room feed opened to an empty room. At 2:17 a man in a trench coat walked into frame. He looked at the camera. He stared straight into the lens. I watched myself watching myself.

I didn’t say a word.