Chương 5
“I know how that sounds.”
“It sounds like the sentence.”
“Consent changes behavior.”
Emma stopped.
“What?”
Daniel seemed to hear himself too late.
“The testing needed natural household behavior.”
“So you decided I didn’t get to consent because consent would ruin your test.”
“No. That’s not—”
“Was I paid?”
“No.”
“Were the babies?”
“Emma.”
“Were you?”
He whispered, “Yes.”
“How much?”
“Eighteen thousand.”
Emma sat on the stairs.
Robert came out of the kitchen, saw her face, and stopped.
She held up one finger.
He stayed where he was.
“Eighteen thousand dollars,” she said.
“It was going toward the cards.”
“What cards?”
Silence.
She closed her eyes.
“What cards, Daniel?”
“Our cards.”
“We have one credit card.”
“I opened another.”
“When?”
“December.”
The babies had been born in June.
December had been when Daniel told her the severance package would carry them until he found something.
“What’s on it?”
“Expenses.”
“What expenses?”
“Mortgage. Insurance. Groceries. The fertility bills we still had.”
“We paid those.”
“Not all of them.”
“You told me we paid them.”
“I thought I could catch up.”
“How much do we owe?”
He told her.
Emma put her free hand over her mouth.
Thirty-one thousand dollars.
Not counting the mortgage.
Not counting the hospital bills still processing through insurance.
Not counting whatever else he had not told her yet.
Robert moved toward her.
Emma shook her head.
He stopped again.
Daniel said, “I was going to fix it.”
“With videos of me?”
“No.”
“That is literally what you did.”
“With the contract. The work. The company was going to bring me on full time.”
“Did they?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Kyle said after the next funding round.”
“When is that?”
“He doesn’t know.”
Emma laughed again.
This one hurt.
“Of course.”
“Emma, I was scared.”
She looked at the nursery.
“So was I.”
“I know.”
“No. You watched me be scared.”
He did not answer.
Her voice dropped.
“Did you record the night I told you I was afraid to be alone with them?”
Daniel inhaled.
She knew before he spoke.
“Daniel.”
“Yes.”
The word was almost inaudible.
Emma remembered that night.
Eleven days after they came home.
Noah would not stop crying.
Eli had finally slept, then startled awake when Emma dropped a bottle.
She had gone forty hours with perhaps three hours of broken sleep. Her incision burned. Milk leaked through her shirt. Daniel was in the shower.
When he came downstairs, he found her sitting on the kitchen floor with Noah screaming against her shoulder.
She had told him she was scared.
Not that she would hurt the babies.
Not that she did not love them.
She had said she was afraid she might walk out the front door and keep walking because the thought of another night made her feel trapped inside her own body.
Daniel had knelt beside her.
He had taken Noah.
He had said, “Then I’ll stay awake.”
He had kissed her forehead.
She had thought it was one of the kindest moments of their marriage.
Now she looked at the dark hallway and asked, “Was the camera running?”
“Yes.”
“Did Kyle see that?”
Daniel did not answer.
Emma ended the call.
Robert approached slowly.
She handed him the phone.
He read the last message Daniel had sent before calling.
I swear the worst part is not what you think.
Robert looked at Emma.
She stared back.
“The worst part,” she said, “is apparently a competitive category.”
At 9:04, Daniel emailed her.
The subject line read: Everything.
Emma almost deleted it.
Instead she opened the message.
It contained usernames, dates, screenshots, a copy of the agreement he had signed with TenderTrace, and a password to an account.
The first page of the agreement contained Daniel’s name.
The second contained hers.
Emma stared at the signature.
It was close.
Not good.
Close.
Daniel had copied the wide E she used in Emma and the long final stroke of Hayes.
He had forgotten that she never dotted the i in her middle name when signing quickly.
Seeing the forgery affected her more than she expected.
A hidden camera was monstrous enough to remain abstract.
Her handwriting was intimate.
She could imagine him practicing it.
Maybe on scrap paper.
Maybe at the kitchen table.
Maybe while she slept.
Robert read over her shoulder.
“What is that?”
“My signature.”
“You signed this?”
“No.”
Robert became very still.
Emma scrolled.
The agreement said all adult household members had consented to participation and that Daniel, as the participating contractor, confirmed he had authority to provide video data generated in designated test areas.
There were references to anonymization, model development, internal review, and possible investor demonstrations.
Emma read the last phrase twice.
“Investor demonstrations.”
Robert leaned closer.
“No.”
She kept reading.
No names.
No addresses.
Faces could be masked when content left the engineering environment.
Could be.
Not must be.
Her phone rang.
Daniel.
She silenced it.
Then another message arrived.
I forged your signature. Kyle didn’t do that. I did. You deserve to know.
Robert said, “At least he admitted it.”
Emma looked at him.
“That was almost a compliment.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Sounded like one.”
Robert sat beside her.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You usually do.”
“I know.”
That silence helped more than anything he might have said.
The next morning Emma woke at 4:46 with Noah making hungry, birdlike noises in the bassinet.
For seven seconds she forgot.
Then she saw her phone on the nightstand.
Everything returned.
She fed Noah in the dim guest room, one hand supporting his head, the other resting over his back.
At 5:02 she noticed the digital alarm clock facing the bed.
She unplugged it.
At 5:03 she felt ridiculous and plugged it back in.
At 5:04 she unplugged it again.
Robert found it on the floor later and did not ask.
By eight, Emma had made three decisions.
She would not go home.
May you like
She would not let Daniel take the twins alone.
And she would not put the footage online, no matter what Robert wanted to do.
