It was Teresa who changed the ground under Vanessa’s feet, and she did it with five quiet words.

Still sitting against the column, still trembling, she looked up past me toward the corners of the high foyer ceiling and said, “Mr.

David.

She knows about the security cameras.”

I watched the color drain out of Vanessa’s face.

To understand why, you have to know something she did not.

Six weeks earlier, I had upgraded the security system on the property.

The visible camera housings had stayed where they were, in plain sight, but the new system did something the old one had not: it saved encrypted copies of everything to a secure cloud server in real time, continuously, so that even if someone unplugged the local recorder in my study, the footage was already gone, already safe, already somewhere no one in the house could reach.