Mark felt the familiar buzz in his pocket. Not work, not a text message he cared about. It was the notification from the ‘SecureHome’ app. Motion detected - Living Room. Probably just the cat, or sunlight shifting. Still, the tiny digital ping sent a strange flutter through his gut, a mix of possessiveness and something else, something unnamed he didn’t want to examine too closely.
He glanced across the cramped office, the grey cubicle walls seeming to close in more than usual. Fucking TPS reports. He hated this job, hated the blandness of it all. The only real colour in his life was Chloe. His wife. Thinking of her was like stepping out of a black-and-white film into blinding technicolor.
He’d installed the security system last month. Ostensibly for ‘peace of mind’. Burglaries were up in the neighbourhood, he’d told Chloe, gesturing vaguely at a local news website. She’d shrugged, accepting it with the easy grace she accepted most things. “Sure, Mark. Whatever makes you feel better.” She hadn’t questioned the multiple cameras – living room, kitchen, hallway, even the back garden and the upstairs landing just outside their bedroom door. He’d told himself it was about thoroughness, about covering all the angles. He’d spent hours positioning them, tweaking the fields of view on the app, feeling a weird sense of control as he watched the empty rooms flicker on his phone screen.
Now, another buzz. Motion detected - Kitchen. He tapped the notification, the app loading slowly on the shitty office Wi-Fi. The live feed resolved into a slightly grainy image of their kitchen. Empty. False alarm. But his thumb hovered over the app’s interface. He could access the recordings. Days worth of them, stored securely in the cloud. He’d only ever checked snippets, testing the playback, making sure it worked.
He thought of Chloe. She’d be home from her yoga class soon, maybe already there. He pictured her walking through the door, dropping her keys in the ceramic bowl by
