My Husband Used Our Daughter’s Funeral to Trap Me Forever
Chapter 5
I learned to live in halves. The woman who moved through the house during the day was not the woman who wrote in the bathroom at night. The woman who answered Brendan's questions with full sentences and appropriate eye contact was not the woman who documented every camera angle and cataloged every moment of surveillance. It was a split so clean I sometimes wondered if I was having a breakdown, or if this was simply what survival looked like.
The first camera I found after Amelia's room was in the kitchen. It was tucked into the decorative wooden vine pattern above the breakfast nook, angled toward the table where we'd eaten a thousand family dinners. I stood at the sink, washing dishes that didn't need washing, and felt its tiny eye on my back. I didn't look up. I didn't react. I just scrubbed a plate until my thumbnail pressed into my palm, and then I moved on to the next one.
'You're so thorough,' Brendan said from the doorway, watching me. 'Always were.'
I turned, dish towel in hand, and smiled at my husband. 'Just trying to keep things in order.'
That night, after he fell asleep, I wrote in my notebook: *Kitchen nook. Vine pattern. Right side, third leaf from the top.*
The next morning, I made his coffee exactly as he liked it—two sugars, no cream—and set it on the counter with a gentle clink. 'Your phone,' I said, placing it screen-down beside the mug. He'd already installed the tracking app. I knew because I'd seen the icon when he wasn't looking.
He picked it up, checked the screen, smiled at me. 'You're learning.'
I was.
I learned that the camera in the living room was disguised as a decorative wall hook. I learned that the one in the master bathroom was nestled in the grout between the tiles, installed at an angle that captured the shower. I learned to move through my own home like a ghost, never quite looking at anything directly, never giving away that I knew I was being watched.
I learned, too, that Brendan's journals were meticulous. I'd memorized fragments during my brief, terrifying inspection—his clinical observations of my 'deviations,' the charts tracking my menstrual cycle, the notes on my 'post-coital affect.' I wrote them down in the bathroom, under the sink cabinet, my phone flashlight casting long shadows across the page. The woman who crouched there, handwriting cramped and urgent, was not the woman who made Brendan's lunch every morning.
But Rachel saw both versions.
'I can't do this,' she whispered the first time I slipped her a note during our 'work meeting' at the café. Her hands trembled as she took it, tucking it into her sleeve. 'This is insane, Lydia.'
'It's already insane,' I said quietly. 'I'm just trying to survive it.'
She looked at me for a long moment, then nodded once. 'What do you need?'
'Alexander. Just tell him I'm alive.'
The next morning, she passed me a folded piece of paper in the bathroom. Her face was pale as she checked the stalls, but her hands were steady now.
'He said Knox Wilson is already looking into things,' she murmured. 'He said to hold on. Just hold on.'
I unfolded the note in the privacy of the stall. Alexander's handwriting, stark and controlled: *Knox has the files. The surveillance network is extensive. Cameras in the car. Journals dating back years. He's looking at the accident report. Something doesn't add up.*
My heart hammered against my ribs. I read it twice more, then flushed it.
Knox Wilson. The name meant nothing to me, but Alexander trusted him. That was enough.
I began to watch Brendan differently. Not as a husband, not as a monster, but as a puzzle. The fifteen minutes Alexander mentioned—what had happened in those fifteen minutes? Why had the nanny-cam in his car been disabled that day?
I thought about Amelia's drawings on the kitchen wall. I thought about how carefully Brendan had preserved them, straightened them, curated them. Like evidence. Like proof of the life he was performing.
I thought about the way Biscuit growled whenever Brendan entered a room.
That night, I wrote: *Accident report. 15 minutes. Car camera disabled. Why?*
The next morning, I made Brendan's coffee and set it on the counter with a gentle clink. I was learning to live in halves. And in the smaller half, the secret half, I was learning to fight back.
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