EPISODE: 2

• I went back to the hospital the next morning. I hadn’t slept. The little black object the doctor pulled out of Mia’s ear sat inside a plastic bag in my jacket pocket, weighing more than it should have. My daughter was with my neighbor, a kind woman I barely knew, but trusted more than my own wife at that point.
• The same doctor met me, but this time he wasn’t alone. He introduced me to a specialist, an older man with wire- rimmed glasses and a serious face. They led me into a private consultation room. No patients, no nurses, just closed doors. The specialist asked if I had touched the object. I told him no. He slipped on gloves and opened the bag.
• He took out the tiny piece like it was something fragile and toxic all at once. He set it down on a tray and examined it with a magnifying lens. His face tightened, then twisted with disbelief. This is not a toy, he said without looking up. It’s a directional audio transmitter. One way, no speaker, no beeping, pure listening, like a baby monitor. He shook his head.
• Not even close. Baby monitors are cheap. This This is military adjacent. A custom job built small on purpose. There’s a micro coil antenna embedded in the shell. And that black coating, that’s noise dampening polymer. This is not sold online. You’d need serious access to get one of the I stared at it. It looked like a tiny black pill with a thread poking out of it.
• Nothing about it screamed danger, but everything in my body did. He looked at me voice low. This wasn’t dropped or swallowed. This was placed with care deliberately. Who would do that to a child? I asked, but I already knew the answer I didn’t want to hear. The doctor spoke now. This isn’t just child endangerment. This is surveillance.
• Someone’s not watching her. They’re watching you through her. That sentence settled deep in my chest like concrete. He leaned forward, his eyes sharp. You need to be careful. Whoever did this, they’re not stupid. They’re calculating. Quiet. They knew how to hide this without alerting anyone, including you. I nodded slowly, my mind spinning.
• Should I call the police? I asked. The doctor hesitated. You could, but if the person who planted that has enough resources to get it in the first place. They might also know how to make the case disappear. And if they think you’re on to them, they could escalate. I left the hospital with a copy of the report and the device sealed up in a new evidence bag.
• I didn’t go home. I didn’t call anyone. I sat in my car and opened my phone. I searched everything I could about Alyssa. Her job history, her school records, her old social media accounts, things I’d never thought to look at before. That’s when I found something strange. Her LinkedIn page listed her as a freelance marketing consultant, but there was no work history, no endorsements, no contacts.
• It looked freshly made like a front. I searched deeper. A reverse image search of her profile picture turned up something I wasn’t ready for. an old article from six years ago. She had a different last name. She was quoted as a tech security assistant for a private firm specializing in confidential data recovery. No mention of marketing.
• The firm didn’t even exist anymore. I clicked on a cached version of their site. It was vague. Lots of corporate speak, but one thing stood out. We help clients retrieve sensitive data from internal threats. Internal threats. People like me. My stomach dropped. Everything from the last few days began to rearrange itself.
• her pushing me to go on that trip. The unexplained silence, the man in our home, the drawing, the thing in my daughter’s ear. She didn’t marry me by accident. She had a reason, a timeline, a plan. And I had just stepped into it blind. I used to think Alyssa was just private. That’s how she always explained it. “I’m not nosy like you,” she joked when I asked why she never wanted to visit my office, why she never cared about my work.
• “I run a small but growing software company. Not flashy, but important enough to be noticed. Still, every time I offered to bring her by, she’d wave it off. You deal with code, I deal with crayons and chaos. Let’s keep our world separate. At the time, it sounded reasonable. Now, it sounded like strategy.
• I started looking back at every business trip. There was a pattern. Whenever I left town, her phone habits changed. She’d stop picking up after 8:00 p.m., only text in short sentences, never initiate a call. I had chocked it up to her being busy with our daughter, but she wasn’t too busy to post on her book club group or like pictures of coffee on Instagram.
• I remembered one trip in particular, a conference in Austin last year. I had called her five times across two days. She only picked up once. I had been irritated back then. Now I was suspicious, so I went deeper. I logged into our shared bank account and pulled up the last year’s worth of transaction. Most were ordinary grocery stores, kids clothes, the usual, but one entry repeated every month for $1,200 to an LLC called Turnian Strategies.
• It was always the same amount on the 15th of every month. I didn’t recognize the name. We had no business expenses tied to it. I Googled it. The site was vague. Something about business consultation and security solutions. No names, no phone numbers, just a contact form and a stock photo of a handshake. I used a dummy email to fill out the form, pretending to be a prospective client.
• An hour later, someone responded with a number. I called. A woman answered, clipped and professional. I introduced myself under a fake name and said I was looking for help monitoring a business partner who might be stealing data. She didn’t flinch. In fact, she said they had lots of experience in that exact area.

EPISODE: 3

• I kept her talking long enough to catch a name, Clarage. That was all I needed. I searched public records and domain data. Turn Strategies was registered to a holding company owned by someone named Kevin Clarage, a former intelligence contractor. A little more digging and I found leaked internal notes from a lawsuit years ago. Notes that listed past clients and cases.
• I scan the file until I found something that froze my blood. My name, my full name, listed as a tier 2 surveillance target domestic. No date, no context, just that line. I wasn’t the client. I was the project. I sat back in my chair, staring at the screen. My chest was tight. I had no idea how long I’d been holding my breath.
• Who hired them? Was it Alyssa or her mother or both? I thought about the way her mom always watched me during holidays, never really smiling, never saying much. I thought about the way Alyssa had moved in so fast when we first met, like she was already certain, like she had a timeline. Now every memory felt staged. The wife I kissed good night.
• The woman I trusted with my daughter, she wasn’t protecting me. She was observing me, and I had no idea how much of my life was even real anymore. That night, after Mia had gone to sleep, I sat at the dining table with her sketchbook. It had become a habit lately, flipping through her pages, trying to spot anything out of place, anything that might tell me what she’d seen, what she’d been exposed to.
• She had always liked drawing houses, people, animals. But this time, a new page caught my eye. It wasn’t our home. It was a room. plain walls, a flat screen TV mounted above a small desk, a bed with two pillows, a little coffee machine drawn on a counter near a window. It wasn’t anything special. Unless you travel for work as much as I do, then you recognize it instantly.
• It was a hotel room. My heart stuttered. I flipped back to the cover of the sketch pad. The drawing was dated. Mia always liked writing numbers in the corner. It matched the week I had been in Atlanta four months ago for a product pitch. A strange memory clicked in my head. The night before the meeting, I had left the room for a drink at the hotel bar.
• When I returned, my charger had been unplugged and moved slightly, but I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. The hotel staff could have been checking smoke alarms or housekeeping might have come in late. But now, now I wasn’t so sure. I called the hotel, told them I was part of an upcoming conference and needed to verify the security measures on site.
• They passed me to the front desk manager. I gave him a fake name and spun a story about wanting to review lobby footage to test the visibility for VIP client. He was hesitant, but eventually agreed to send me a snippet of the lobby cameras from that night between 9 and 10 p.m. I told him I’d confirm the exact times after reviewing. He sent a link to the video file.
• I watched it in the dark while Mia slept just down the hall. At 9:17 p.m., I saw her. Alyssa alone, no luggage, dressed casually, but not like she had come for dinner. She walked past the concierge with purpose, holding her phone in one hand and something small in the other. A key card may She didn’t go to the elevator.
• She went to the service hallway. I recognized it. It led to the staff only stairs. 32 minutes later, she walked out the same way. This time, nothing in her hands. No one stopped her. No one questioned anything. I shut the laptop slowly and just stared at the screen. The next morning, I opened up my work bag from that trip.
• I hadn’t used it since. dug through the side pocket, pulled out the same charger I’d been using that week. It looked normal until I flipped it over and felt something rough along the edge. There was a seam where no seam should be. I used a thin screwdriver and gently pried it open. Inside, wired along the casing was a wafer thin chip, not something built by the manufacturer.
• Someone had added it, someone who knew exactly what they were doing. I didn’t know whether to feel sick, angry, or scared. Maybe all three. The truth wasn’t just that Alyssa had betrayed me. It was that she had planned this, studied it, put things in place quietly months ago. She had walked into my hotel room with one purpose, to plant something, and I had let her do it.
• The betrayal wasn’t a moment. It was a structure designed, built slowly, hidden in routine, and now I was living inside it. I cooked dinner that night like it was any other Thursday. Roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans. Mia helped me set the table, humming as she placed forks with perfect six-year-old precision. Alyssa arrived right on time.
• her mother. 10 minutes later, both smiling like nothing was wrong. I smiled, too. The dining room lights were soft, the wine was open, the food was hot. Everyone sat down, made small talk. Mia talked about a book her teacher had read in class. Alyssa nodded along, pretending to listen. Her mother commented on the weather.
• No one mentioned the hospital. No one mentioned what the doctor found. So, I did. Halfway through the meal, I cut another piece of chicken and spoke without looking up. The doctor said it wasn’t an ear infection, I said almost casual. He pulled something out. Said it was placed on purpose. The fork slipped from Alyssa’s hand.
• It hit the plate with a sharp clink. Her mother’s fingers stopped midcut. She pressed her lips together. Said nothing. I glanced up. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Alyssa tried to recover, forcing a small smile. What do you mean? The thing in Mia’s ear. It wasn’t a toy. It was a transmitter. She blinked. A what? An audio device. Spy level.
• He said it wasn’t something a kid could have found on her. said, “Someone put it there carefully, deliberately.” Alyssa’s face went pale. Her mother looked down, jaw-tight, silent. I leaned forward slightly. My voice calm. “Why did you need to bug your own daughter?” The silence was immediate, thick. Alyssa shifted in her seat, eyes flicking toward Mia, who was too busy stacking green beans to notice the tension.
• Her mother finally set her knife down and took a slow sip of wine. “No answer, no excuses, no outrage, no laughter, just an icy pause.” I nodded slowly. Okay, that was it. I didn’t press. I didn’t yell. I cleared my plate and helped Mia with hers. The conversation limped along until dessert, mostly about school and weekend plan. Then they left.
• Alyssa kissed Mia on the head and told her to sleep well. She didn’t kiss me. The next morning, I got up early. Mia was still asleep. I checked the evidence I’d kept. Hospital paperwork, security footage screenshots, even the charger with a hidden chip. I had everything tucked away in a locked box in my office closet.