Chapter 3 - The Missing Camera Footage
By midnight, Roberto’s mansion no longer felt like a home.
It felt like a crime scene.
Mateo Rivera, head of private security, sat in Roberto’s office scrolling through the smart-home system.
Roberto stood behind him.
“Show me every camera from the last three months.”
Mateo hesitated.
“There’s a problem.”
“What?”
“Several interior cameras stopped recording at specific times.”
Roberto’s jaw tightened.
“Malfunction?”
“No.”
Mateo turned the screen around.
“Manual privacy override.”
“Who has access?”
“You.”
“Me.”
“And Mrs. Alvarez.”
Vanessa.
Roberto stared at the logs.
The living room camera had been disabled repeatedly.
Always between six and nine at night.
Always while Roberto was at work.
The camera outside Sofía’s bedroom showed similar interruptions.
So did the upstairs hallway.
“She knew exactly where the cameras were.”
Mateo nodded.
“She helped redesign the system last year.”
Roberto remembered.
Vanessa had called the cameras intrusive.
She said a woman should not feel watched in her own home.
Roberto had thought the complaint reasonable.
Now he understood why she had wanted control.
“Can anything be recovered?”
“Maybe.”
Mateo enlarged a system map.
“The main cameras were shut down.”
“But the nursery audio monitor still backed up to an old cloud server.”
Roberto froze.
“Sofía hasn’t used the nursery in years.”
“The device was never removed.”
“Can you access it?”
Mateo began typing.
It took forty minutes.
Roberto spent every one of them sitting beside Sofía’s bed.
She had finally fallen asleep with María in the chair beside her.
At 1:07 a.m., Mateo called him downstairs.
“We found recordings.”
Roberto sat at the desk.
Mateo pressed play.
At first, there was only static.
Then Vanessa’s voice.
“Stop crying.”
Sofía whimpered.
“I want Daddy.”
“He isn’t coming.”
Roberto’s hands curled into fists.
Another recording.
“If you spill another glass, I take the rabbit.”
“No.”
“Then behave normally.”
“I’m trying.”
“You’re always trying.”
Vanessa laughed.
“That’s the problem.”
Roberto looked away.
Mateo stopped the recording.
“There’s more.”
“Play it.”
“Sir—”
“Play it.”
A third file began.
María’s voice was audible.
“She is seven years old.”
Vanessa answered.
“She is the obstacle between me and everything I deserve.”
Roberto’s entire body went still.
Mateo glanced at him.
The recording continued.
María said something too quietly to understand.
Vanessa responded.
“You think Roberto will choose you?”
“He won’t even believe Sofía.”
“He already failed her once.”
Roberto stopped breathing.
Then Vanessa said the sentence that changed the direction of everything.
“Her mother should have learned the same lesson.”
Mateo immediately paused the file.
Neither man spoke.
Roberto finally whispered.
“What lesson?”
Mateo looked at him.
“I don’t know.”
Roberto replayed the sentence.
Her mother should have learned the same lesson.
Not heard about.
Not would have understood.
Should have learned.
As if Vanessa had known Elena.
As if she had known her before the crash.
Roberto called Detective Samuel Hale, the retired investigator who had handled Elena’s accident.
Hale answered groggily.
“Roberto?”
“I need the original crash file.”
Silence.
“That case was closed three years ago.”
“Open it.”
“Why?”
Roberto looked toward the recording waveform on the screen.
“Because my current wife just admitted she knew something about my first wife.”
Hale went quiet.
Then he said something Roberto had never heard before.
May you like
“I wondered when this day would come.”
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