And when I opened the system’s audit log, it told me why, in language that left no room at all for an innocent reading: a manual override, executed directly from the main control panel in our hallway.

Someone had walked to the panel and switched the cameras off by hand.

Three hours later, the feeds reconnected, and the ordinary footage resumed, as though nothing had ever interrupted it.

My hands were not quite steady as I began cross-referencing other dates — every day over the past year when Theo had been home sick, or when I had worked late past eight in the evening.

And the pattern that emerged was so consistent that it stopped being upsetting and became, instead, almost clinical in its horror.