Shall We Begin?

We didn’t have weeks to unravel their fraud.

We had three days.

I felt the nausea rising, and then my phone buzzed against the desk.

It was a motion alert from the interior camera I’d stuck to the kitchen shelf that morning — a nothing precaution, because the back door’s lock had been sticking and I hadn’t wanted to think about why.

I pulled up the live feed.

The kitchen was dark, lit only by moonlight coming off the snow. A figure moved along the counter by the stove.