The plate came back to my husband’s brother, Cody. I stared at the screen because Cody hadn’t spoken to us in almost a year. I called my husband and asked why his truck had been sitting across from our house nineteen times. He said Cody was probably checking whether we were home, then immediately asked whether I’d noticed anyone getting out. That was the first thing that bothered me. I hadn’t told him anyone had gotten out. I had only said I found a missing package. I went back through the footage and watched the two nights again. Cody never came to the door. He walked up to the edge of our driveway, looked directly at the camera, and then walked back to the truck.
I asked my husband why Cody would know about the camera. He said he didn’t. Then he asked me to delete the footage. I refused. He got unusually angry and told me I was making something out of nothing. That night I checked the camera settings and found that someone had logged into the account from a device I didn’t recognize. The login happened three minutes before Cody’s truck appeared on the street for the first time. I changed the password and checked the account history. There were twenty-one remote logins over the previous two months. Every one happened when my husband was supposedly asleep. Then I noticed something worse: whoever was watching wasn’t just viewing the front-door camera. They had access to the garage camera too.
The next morning I checked the garage footage from the night my husband claimed he’d “handled” Cody. There was no footage of Cody coming inside. But at 9:17 p.m., my husband walked out to the garage carrying a cardboard box. He put it in the truck, drove away, and returned forty minutes later without it. I asked him where he’d gone. He said he’d been running an errand. Then I showed him the footage. He sat down without saying anything. Finally, he admitted Cody had been coming around because someone had been paying him to watch our house. I asked who. My husband looked at me and said, “I don’t know.” I played the recording from the camera again. In the background, just before Cody walked away, someone inside the truck said, “Tell him she still hasn’t found the papers.”
