The protection unit brought me an adapted tablet, and from my hospital bed I reached into my own secure cloud — the systems I had built, the ones Emiliano never understood well enough to fear.

I logged into the small discreet cameras I kept at home, the ones I’d installed to watch my dogs when I traveled.

I told myself I was only checking that the dogs were fed.

What I actually found was the full shape of the life my husband and sister had already started living in my house, certain I would never come home.

Chapter 9 — The House

The cameras showed me my own bedroom, and Emiliano and Ximena in it — sleeping in my bed, sorting my things into trash bags, arguing without any caution at all, because they believed the only person who might ever hear them was breathing through a machine across the city.