Chapter 3

I didn't sleep all night, surviving on two extra-strong coffees.

At dawn, with bloodshot eyes, I called my best friend, Chloe.

Chloe was my college roommate. Now she's a senior engineer at a cybersecurity firm in Silicon Valley, a woman who lives and breathes logic and code.

When she answered, I only said one thing: "Chloe, I think I'm in trouble."

She immediately heard the panic in my voice.

"Deep breaths, Sarah. Tell me everything, slowly."

I explained last night's events in the most concise way I could.

There were a few seconds of silence on the other end.

"Send me the original video files from the last few days. Immediately."

"I'll have my audio team isolate the sound tracks, see what's in the background noise."

"And you," she paused, her tone serious, "from now on, you maintain your professional poker face. Whatever he's acting out, you just watch. Do not tip him off."

"I understand."

After hanging up, I sent Mark a text.

"Leo fell asleep last night, and the tablet died. Saw the snow you sent, so beautiful! But please stay warm and don't catch a cold."

I added a heart emoji.

He replied almost instantly: "Got it, Babe. Don't worry."

That evening, at our scheduled call time, Mark's face appeared on the screen again.

This time, his background was different.

It wasn't the window with the "dead tree" anymore. It was a blank, flawless white wall.

"Oh, new spot today?" I asked with a smile, my tone as casual as if we were discussing weekend brunch plans.

A flicker of unease crossed his face, but he quickly hid it.

"Yeah, the project team's conference room. The signal is better here."

"Why not open a window for some air? I wanted Leo to see your Arctic snowscape," I pushed.

His eyes darted away. "No windows in the conference room," he answered stiffly. "And it's too cold. Don't want to get sick and fall behind on work."

I nodded and dropped the subject.

I turned the camera to our son, who was playing with his building blocks.

"Leo, ask Daddy where he's at with the Star Wars model you gave him."

Leo immediately scrambled over to the screen. "Daddy, Daddy, did you finish it? Isn't it super cool?"

On the other side of the screen, Mark froze.

He stammered, "Uh... that... almost. I've been so busy with deadlines, I haven't had time to get to it."

I laughed coldly to myself.

I had taken Leo to stand in line at the toy store to buy that set. It was his going-away present.

It was still sitting in our office closet, the box unopened.

He never even took it with him.

Less than ten minutes after we hung up, Chloe called.

Her voice was electric with the contained excitement of a hacker who just found a system vulnerability.

"Sarah, I got him!"

"I had my colleague run noise reduction and gain processing on the background audio. We extracted two very valuable sound clips."

"The first one is a bird call."

She sent me an audio file.

It was a complex and varied bird song.

"I had our bio-recognition guy run it against the database. It's a Northern Mockingbird. They're found mainly in the southern United States. They would absolutely never be found in the Arctic tundra."

My heart sank further and further.

"But more importantly," Chloe lowered her voice, "we isolated a very faint human voice from last night's recording. Right before your son spoke, someone was talking in the background."

"It's just one word, and it's very muffled, but after voiceprint analysis, that drawn-out 'Y'all' is a classic Southern accent."

The South...

That familiar yet distant direction was like a rusty key, forcing open a long-forgotten corner of my memory.

"Chloe..." My voice trembled. "His college ex-girlfriend... the cheerleader from Georgia."

On the other end of the line, Chloe gasped.

The words "ex-girlfriend" stabbed into my heart like a poisoned dagger, and then twisted.

I remembered.

Her name was Jessica.

A girl I had only seen once in the old photo albums on Mark's college social media page.

A past he had dismissed lightly, saying, "We were too young, didn't know any better. We lost touch ages ago."

I frantically opened my laptop and navigated to the deepest corner of our shared cloud drive, finding an encrypted folder named "College Days."

The password was the last four digits of his social security number.