“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Ben was always opposed to that. Ever since I found ours missing from under the Welcome mat.”
Waylon raises his eyebrows, but I shake my head.
“That was years ago,” I say. “Mason was, like, six months old.”
Waylon looks back down, nodding, and I can still remember its grimy outline making my stomach squeeze. Ben had assured me that we had probably just misplaced it—maybe it fell out of my pocket on one of my walks with Roscoe or slipped through the wooden slats of our porch—but still. It spooked us: the thought of somebody else being able to lift up that flimsy piece of fabric and let themselves into our lives so easily, almost as if we had invited them in ourselves. It made me realize that we were too trusting; that, too often, we just assume nobody is out to hurt us. That nobody is watching when we walk around our houses at night, blinds open, the lights from inside illuminating our every move. That when we step outside and lock our doors, stash the key beneath a flower pot or wedged behind a rock, they’re not going to walk up behind us and dig it back out.
That the violence isn’t always looking for a way in—always poking and prodding at our lives, searching for a soft spot to sink in its teeth.
“What about the baby monitor?” he asks next, and I shoot him a look.
“The batteries were dead. Remember, I told you—”
“Sorry, yeah,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “What I mean is, did the monitor keep any earlier recordings? Like, did they save? Like a security system?”
“Yeah, they did,” I say. “It was connected to WiFi, so the video synced to our cell phones and laptop. You control it all from an app.”
“Do you still have that old footage?”
“I should,” I say, speaking slowly. The police had asked for footage of that night, the night he was taken, but since the batteries were dead, I couldn’t help them. They never asked for earlier footage, though, and I never really thought to look. It didn’t seem important, looking inside the house. I had spent all my time looking outside of it. “Why?”
“Just in case there’s something on there to see,” he says. “In the days leading up to his kidnapping. You never know.”
I nod, push myself up from the floor, and walk over to the table, grabbing my laptop. I bring it back over to Waylon, who’s taking another sip of his whiskey, his eyes inspecting something at the bottom of his glass. I open the laptop, type in my password, and find the folder housing the old recordings, buried deep in my hard drive. There are hundreds of files in there, organized by date, each one storing a night of Mason’s life.
“I guess I’ll start about a week earlier?” I ask, looking at him. He shrugs, nods, so I double-click on the file labeled “Thurs_Feb_24_2022” and hold my breath as a video loads.
It starts in the morning, six a.m., with Mason sleeping. My breath catches in my throat as I watch from the corner of his nursery, where the camera is mounted, his little body lying still on the mattress.
“He’s cute,” Waylon says, and I look over my shoulder at him watching the screen. He smiles at me. “Big head of hair.”
“Yeah,” I say, that familiar sting in my eyes.
After a couple of minutes, he starts to stir, and a few seconds later I see his door crack open, and I watch as I walk into his bedroom, leaning into his crib and picking him up. I plant a kiss on his cheek, bouncing him around and making him laugh, before we walk back out the door and leave the room empty behind us.
“I was hoping we might be able to see his window,” Waylon says, pointing at the screen. “But it doesn’t look like it. Not from this vantage point.”
“No,” I say. “The camera is mounted behind his crib, facing the door. The window is next to his crib, so it wouldn’t show up here.”
I click on the timer at the bottom of the video, fast-forwarding through a couple hours of empty room. Around midday, I watch as I drop Mason back off for a nap, then later that night, as I carry him over to his bookshelf, choose a story, and read it to him in a rocking chair in the corner, lulling him to sleep.
We’re both quiet for a while until I clear my throat, trying to push down the tears I can feel crawling their way up.
“Thanks for doing that,” Waylon says, his voice soft. “It was worth a shot. But hey, I’m going to bed. And you should, too. We’ll pick this up in the morning.”
I nod, give him a close-lipped smile, and watch as he stands up and puts his glass in the sink, slinking off down the hall and closing the door behind him. I hear the faint shuffles of movement in the guest room—pulling back his comforter, removing his clothes—and wait until the light clicks off, the crack underneath the door going dark.