Chapter 0 : 3

The cameras were the hardest part.

Camille had expected the documents. The LLC transfers, the utility bill in her name, the canceled checks with forged signatures — she'd spent the first four hours in that back room cataloging what she now understood was a trail of financial fraud that had been running, she estimated, for at least seven years. Some of it was simple: Grant had moved money out of joint accounts and into accounts in the LLC, using her name as the signatory on the loans he'd then defaulted on. Some of it was elaborate: shell companies, property flips, a series of increasingly brazen moves that read like a confession of a man who believed he'd never be caught.

But the cameras were different.

She found them in a locked drawer of the metal desk — not the filing cabinet, which had been unlocked, but the desk's bottom drawer, which had required her picks a second time. Inside: three cellular cameras, still in their packaging, with receipts taped to the boxes. One was the model that matched the hidden unit she'd planted in the potted plant. The other two were smaller, newer, the kind that could be mounted anywhere — inside a chandelier, behind a mirror, in a coat hook.

The receipts were dated. The first, for the camera model she recognized, was from eighteen months ago. The second, for the newer ones, was from four weeks ago. And on the last receipt, in the margin, in Grant's tight handwriting: *Master bedroom. Her closet. If she ever opens that safe I want to know.*

Camille set the cameras down on the desk and sat in the office chair, which creaked under her weight. She hadn't known about the safe. She'd lived in that house for eleven years and Grant had never mentioned a safe — not in the master bedroom, not in her closet. She'd hung her dresses in that closet every night. She'd never seen a safe door, never noticed a false panel, never found a seam in the drywall.

But Grant had a camera aimed at it. Which meant there was something in that safe worth protecting. Which meant she had been sleeping four feet away from it for a decade.

Her phone buzzed again. Grant: **"The apartment. Report. Now."**

Camille typed: **"Sink blocked. Fixing."** Then she put the phone in her bag, slid the cameras back into the drawer, locked it, and stood up.

She had a decision to make. She could go home, unlock the safe, and see what was inside. That was the move her grandmother would have made — got to the evidence, got it in hand, then moved. But her grandmother had never lived with a man who put cameras in her closet. Her grandmother had never had to calculate whether the risk of being seen on a hidden feed outweighed the risk of leaving the evidence behind.

Camille had seventeen boxes of Grant's financial history in this room. She'd filled four trash bags with copies — receipts, bank statements, transfer logs, property deeds — and stuffed them behind the dust-covered sofa in the living room, wrapped in an old wool blanket she'd found on top of the hot water tank. The originals were still on the shelves, arranged exactly as she'd found them, in case he ever checked.