It is enough to say that the times lined up exactly with everything she had told me: the jewelry box carried in while she was meant to be out, and then, later, the far worse things, each one logged with a patient timestamp, each one preserved, the local recorder Vanessa had so cleverly unplugged the night before having made no difference at all to the copies already safe on the server.

At one point Vanessa’s own recorded voice came through the phone’s small speaker, saying something about how, once we were married, no one in the house would ever question her again.

She had said it to a woman she believed powerless, in a house she believed unwatched.

It was, in the end, the most honest thing she ever said, and she had said it directly into a microphone.

That line has stayed with me because of what it revealed about the shape of the thing she was building.