Chapter 3 - THE RECORDING THAT WAS DELETED
Daniel didn’t sleep.
At 2:14 a.m., he opened the home security app on his laptop.
The backyard camera showed nothing unusual before that afternoon.
The hallway camera showed nothing either.
Too clean.
Daniel knew the system stored thirty days of motion clips.
Now there were gaps everywhere.
He called the security company.
A technician answered after several transfers.
“Sir, the clips were manually deleted from an administrator account.”
Daniel stared at the screen.
“Which administrator?”
“There are two.”
Daniel already knew the answer.
His account.
And Claire’s.
“Can you recover anything?”
“Maybe thumbnails from the cloud cache.”
Twenty minutes later, a folder appeared in Daniel’s inbox.
Most images were useless.
A shadow in the hall.
A door opening.
A blurred figure.
Then Daniel saw one image timestamped 1:07 a.m. three weeks earlier.
Claire was standing outside Sarah’s old study.
She had told Daniel she had never entered that room because it felt “too personal.”
In the picture, she was using a screwdriver on the lock.
Another thumbnail showed her coming out fourteen minutes later.
She was holding papers.
And a blue metal box.
Daniel’s hands began to shake.
Lily appeared quietly at the office door.
“Daddy?”
He closed the laptop halfway.
“Why are you awake?”
“I had the bad dream.”
He lifted her into his lap.
“What happened in the dream?”
“Claire was asking where Mommy put the bird.”
Daniel frowned.
“What bird?”
“The red one.”
Lily looked toward the dark hallway.
“She said if I told you, you would get hurt.”
Daniel hugged her tighter.
“Did she say that more than once?”
Lily nodded.
Then she whispered something Daniel never expected.
“She showed me a picture of Mommy.”
Daniel’s body went rigid.
“What picture?”
Lily pointed at his laptop.
“A picture with Claire in it.”
Daniel slowly opened the screen again.
May you like
For three years, Claire had insisted she never knew Sarah.
Now his daughter was telling him she had seen proof that Claire had lied from the day they met.
