Who's Watching

"The police came and searched the house. Helen stood there with me. They found these hidden cameras and a box in the basement that recorded the contents," she told me then paused, taking time to figure out how best to ask the question. I knew what she wanted to know, so I saved her from asking.

"I didn't install the cameras. I've no idea who did that. I wish I did, I wish they had warned me of what she had planned. Or warned me before that of her affair. Did you know him?"

"He was my teacher back in middle school, but I hadn't seen him since I moved up to the high school."

"So the police found the videos, and knew about your mom. What happened next?" I asked.

"Well, they took away the storage device, but didn't tell us what was on it. The detective on the case told us to call him immediately if she contacted me, then left. I uniformed police woman informed me that they would contact social services and let them know I was alone. Helen stepped in then and said she wasn't alone.

"Helen moved in that day. Your company managed to get a lawyer for her, and they dealt with social services. For days left before I turned eighteen, social services didn't care, they just gave Helen the paperwork to be my guardian for the next few days and kicks us out of the office. Didn't offer any counselling or anything. Someone was there to look after me and they washed their hands of me. It was pathetic, dad!"

I could feel her hurt there. The anger. I'm sure some of it was being cast off by the people that should have been her safety net. By the one, who when all else fails, come to the rescue and look after you. But, her real anger was the sense of being abandoned by her loving parents. She just deflected that anger. After all, I'd been shot and had no control over what had happened and she knew that but still, I wasn't there when she needed me. Her mother, she had run away, fleeing the results of her actions. I wondered if she even gave a thought for the daughter she had left behind.

"I ... I'm sorry, honey. I wish I should, I would have been there for you if I could," I told her, tears rolling down my tears at the thoughts of what my daughter had to go through. My own guilt at not being there for her mixed with relief that Helen had been.

"Oh, daddy," she said, her own tears flowing now. "Daddy, I know you'd have been there if you could. Knowing you fought to live. Fought to come back to us. It helped. You didn't give up dad, and so I couldn't give up.

"Helen helped though. She moved in. She paid rent too, to ensure there was money for the bills. She saw me through the last of school, helped me pick the college and even came out with me for orientation."

"I'm so glad you had someone to help, honey. Where is Helen now?" I wondered. Helen had been my work wife sort of. I guess I kind of had a few of them. I ran the programmers, assigned their tasks and monitoring their progress. She designed the games user interface and assigned the graphic artists. We'd discuss what we could and couldn't do. We'd match-make programmers and graphic artists for the tasks. Knowing for the best results, you had to have people that worked well together working together. After all, the late nights of crunch time created enough stress that you didn't want to add personality conflicts if you can help it. But, you also wanted to ensure the best possible product.

Helen and I worked to ensure that together. She had been my sounding board at work, as I had been hers. It had all be above board and professional.

"She's at work. She texted me that you'd been moved from the long term facility. I was told you had woken up and she went there this morning. She'll be by in the evening. I should tell you she still lives in our house."

"Okay."

"She would check up on you once a week for me. I wouldn't have gone to UW if she hadn't agreed to that."

"Honey, you need to do what's right for you. If that school was the one for you then you should go, no matter what. Your grandfather would be proud you went to his alma mater. He wanted me to go there, I just found life got in the way of that."

Our conversation got put on hold then when a doctor turned up to examine me and sign off on my starting physical therapy. After he left, I noticed that she pulled my daughter into a room. I assumed to talk about next steps. The kind of support I'd have if released and that kind of stuff. I'd told him I had no idea what would be at home for me. Explaining my daughter was now in University on the other side of the country and that my wife and her lover were the reason for me being here in the first place.

It left me with my thoughts and emotions for company. I felt a wave of seething anger for my wife leaving our daughter to fend for herself. Stupid really because Helen was an adult, she could take care of herself. Or could under normal circumstances, losing both parents wasn't that. I still had trouble believing she'd had an affair, let alone try to kill me for him. I felt like demanding proof, demanding to see the videos they claimed to have to prove that to me. To allow me to let go of the idea that the police and my daughter were wrong. Even though logically, the fact she had run and wasn't here showed her guilt. If she cheated, why did she do it?

Not being there enough for her? She'd always said she understood and the long breaks after the project shipped where good times. She knew we had been getting close to the next one. By the timesheets, this one would be a month-long. I could extend that with the three weeks I hadn't taken. Giving us all of December and January together possibly. Maybe that was the reason why she tried to kill me now. When I'd be off work, she wouldn't be able to sneak out and him.

Did she fall in love with him? I wasn't there as much as some would be. So, maybe me not being there as much left her vulnerable to his attention. Then, given his more limited prospects, they'd decided to try and keep everything we had. Problem with that it didn't sound like my wife.

I had to admit unless she was found, I would never know why. Even if they caught her, she might not feel inclined to tell me anyway.

Maybe it was best to focus on getting better, looking to the future and making sure I was there for Emily whenever she needed me.

Emily returned from talking to the doctor and our conversation turned to more mundane things. She talked about her courses and projects at school, where her friends had ended up for college and the new friends she'd made in Seattle. She talked of attending Washington Huskies football games and trips to the Seattle Thunderbirds play.

Later, Helen joined us and she added gossip from the office, update on the game we'd been working on when I shot and the new game, a sequel to my last game. That game it seemed had lots of problems. Greg had left to take up a Producer role in the Bay Area and exposed who did the real management work on our team. We all knew it, now management had proof of what I'd told them. Though Mike, the Producer, blamed Greg's replacement, at assistant producer position, and the time he had to put in to train him. A guy he picked and who had never worked in games before, coming from a medical software company. Helen wanted to quit, go do her own thing.

That last item had me wondering if she had stuck around just for me and to support Emily. I would need to talk to her when Emily wasn't around.

A few hours later, we were all yawning and decided to call it a night. As they headed out of the room, I realized one thing I hadn't asked.

"Emily, did you come straight here from the airport?"

"Yes, dad."

"Where is your suitcase?"

"At the nurses' station."

"Okay. Love you, see you tomorrow."

"I love you too," Helen said with a smile. Emily smiled at hearing it and walked out of the room. Missing Helen blowing me a kiss before exiting herself before I had time to react.

### Recovery

Turned out, I woke at just the right time for Emily. It had been a day before the reading week prior to heading into exams. She had even talked to one of her professors and managed to get her exams proctored through a friend at the State University, an hour's drive away. It would mean some late night exams, as they insisted on her doing them at the same time as her classmates. But, she could do them here and remain with me.

She spent days with me, her laptop and course text books in hand. I quizzed her when she asked. I talked through solutions that I would use in some of the situations presented. I had fun, ignoring why I was in the hospital was an added benefit, and felt Emily and I getting closer than we'd ever been.

The physical therapy kicked my butt in those first two weeks. I walked on shaky legs down a channel created by two bars I could use to hold myself up if I needed at the end.

It got me released in time for Thanksgiving at home. Which Emily and I ate at a local hotel. Helen had headed out of town, gone to visit her parents, sister and brother in Florida.

I expected that entering the house for the first time would feel like coming home. It didn't. It felt like I'd walked into a crime scene, seeing the ghosts of my wife's crimes in every room.

With Helen gone, I slept in the guest bedroom rather than the master. Helen's scent was more comforting than anything else in that house other than my daughter.

I knew that I'd have to sell this house. A fresh start. A complete break from the memories of all the good times with my wife and the ghosts of what might have occurred in these rooms by her.

The day after, I called a real estate agent and started the process of putting the house on the market. He warned me it was a slow market and the slow time of the year. So, I should expect it to take some time to sell the house. Maybe even into the New Year.

Monday after Thanksgiving, I went to work and arranged to spend time working from home. I'd just be a programmer on the game. My job would be to work through the bug database, coordinating with the person assigned the bug via Skype and then looking to fix it if they were agreeable to that. I knew most of them would be. Unless they knew exactly what the problem was and had a solution for it then offloading it would be a blessing to them.

Tuesday, Helen brought home a console and a work laptop for me to use and after my morning trip to the hospital for physio, I began work. It felt good to be back to work, even if I wasn't yet back at work. The afternoon proved to be a lot of fun, sitting there looking for bugs and talk through the problems and solutions with my daughter.

Wednesday we got up early and dropped Emily off at the airport for her flight back to school. We had a tearful goodbye, I felt like my life was leaving again. She didn't really want to go either, having just got me back. But she would be back soon, for Christmas, and I suddenly felt like a change of scenery could be good for me so, maybe I would follow her out there after I'd found a new job.

I returned to work properly a week before Christmas, the day after the Christmas party that I attended with Helen as my date. No, we hadn't got together, she had a long term boyfriend. Though, strangely, he never came around the house and she never spent the night at his place.

Christmas holiday was good, again just Emily and me. But we enjoyed ourselves. We even drove into Philadelphia for a Flyers game on the 27th, a present from Emily to me but it could have equally been from me to her.

In the New Year, she returned to school and Helen returned from Florida and a trip to her parents. My physio was down to once a week. Midway through the week also brought a visit from the police.

They returned the storage and control device for the cameras that had been in the house along with the cameras themselves. They had cloned the videos to their systems, which was all the evidence they needed. They had tracked the system to a purchase made from Costco in Baltimore, that had then been returned and sold to a discount warehouse chain and whoever bought it there, paid in cash and the trail went cold.

I sat and watched some of the video footage that day.

After I'd downloaded the software for the system. It took awhile to find, the company that made the system no longer supported it and their newest software for the new system didn't recognize the hardware. Thankfully, tucked away on the edge of the internet on an Abandonware server, I found a version intended for an older version of Windows, but worked thankfully the latest. It had problems, in that the connection to the hardware would break at odd intervals but I could see the video and hear the audio.

I wished I didn't in the end. Wished I'd just left it alone.

The interface for the software presented a timeline at the bottom list of cameras at the top. When the system had camera footage to show then it would expand to show a play window, when it didn't it shrank down to just a Windows title bar with the camera name. If more than four cameras where active then four would show footage and the others would show a black screen and a prompt to click to view. That camera's footage would then be displayed and one of the four would stop.

I rolled the slider through the initial footage that showed the police searching the house. Various camera lighting up as they went from room to room and the final footage showing the back of a male officer as he pulled the plug on the system.

Scrolling through, I found the start point of their last encounter together. The doorbell rang and my wife, who had been pacing around like a caged animal in the living room, went to answer it.

They pair came into the living room.

" ... have it?" being the first audio, it came from my wife.

"Of course," he told her, opening a child's Spider-Man book bag and producing a gun. The gun that had shot me. Seeing it caused me to feel the pain again that night.

When I recovered, Maggie was talking. " ... him down quickly. I don't want him to suffer. Promise me you'll get close enough and it'll be quick. As painless as it can be."

"Sweetie, I'm a ninja, trust me, he won't hear me coming and it'll be a single bullet to the back of the head. He'll be dead before he knows he's been shot. Now less talk, I want a little sucky-sucky and fucky-fucky action before I leave."

Any hope I had that somehow my wife had been innocent ended there.

They started to kiss, clothes got strewn all over the living room and then she blew him for one load. Once he'd recovered, they moved from the sofa to my easy chair. I watched as she impaled herself and rode him for all she was worth. She came several times before rising up off him. I figure she'd got what she wanted and was done. But, no, she then sank back down and the slower motion and the grunts from him extolling the virtues of being buried in her ass told me they'd just switched hole.

Maggie and I had experimented with anal sex, she'd claimed it hurt too much and didn't want to explore anymore. I was fine with that, I didn't want to hurt her back then. On this day, it might have been a different answer.

The ease with which she took his member in her ass told a story in and of itself. They or at least she had done this frequently.

I fast-forwarded through the rest of that encounter and found them in the shower together. Truly showering at first then that too turned to sex.

Finally, he left. I noticed by the timestamp it was 10 pm. Had he waited outside the building for four hours?

The answer came from watching my wife. She sat on the sofa in the living room watching television. Around eleven, Emily turned up and went to bed. One thirty, the phone rang. It was me, telling her I'd be leaving for home soon, and sure enough, she then called him and told him it was 'go time'.

I felt sick to my stomach then and there. She had just sent her lover to kill me and did it as nonchalantly as she would have if she was ordering a pizza.

At this point, I just scrubbed back through the timeline. Looking to confirm what the Police told me that it was just him.

I noticed they took great delight in having sex in places I considered mine. The marital bed, my easy chair in the living room, on my desk and chair in my home office down in the basement and in the front seat of my car. That last one caught me by surprise. The only time Maggie had my car all year had been to take it in for a service for me and she'd used that time to ensure she and her lover fucked in the car.

After I'd finished, I knew I needed out of the house as soon as I could and I needed a new car. I just couldn't bring myself to drive the one sitting in the garage.

From that day, if I wasn't working or doing my rehab, I was boxing. I started with her clothes and her knick-knacks. Once boxed they got donated to the Salvation Army thrift store.

I'd not been back in the house an hour that day when the phone rang. The old gentleman I'd offloaded my wife's things to called to tell me they'd found one hundred dollars in the jeans pocket and offered to send it to me. I told him to stick it in a donation box, theirs or another charity's.

Once I felt I'd exorcised enough of her to make the house bearable until it sold, I made an appointment with a lawyer.

The first meeting turned into a complete bust. With us not knowing where she was, we couldn't do a quick divorce. I wouldn't be ninety days then filing and waiting for the divorce decree.

No, I had to look for her. I had to file for freedom of information act records to see if any agencies could locate her. This despite an open investigation that was looking for her.

I left my lawyer's office in a rage after having hit some inanimate objects and screamed blue murder at the world.

Thankfully, he understood and allowed me to return, tell him I'm sorry and then have him start the work on the divorce.

Summer holidays arrived and Emily returned home. The house had finally sold, I had a new job. I'd be working for the Evil Empire or the Borg as I learnt other local professionals in Redmond called them. I had no idea what the project was that I'd be working on, just that the team I'd working with had been part of the group that created the Xbox Kinect.

The three trips out for interviews during the spring had been great. It offered a chance to see my daughter between holidays. It also brought me to Professor Susan Shikongo, the daughter of a Namibian refugee.

She had just taken a post at UW, and had been in town to look for somewhere to live. She would be moving up during the summer from Los Angeles, California. Looking to be settled in before the fall term started. We literally bumped into each other. Me stepping off the elevator, as she tried to step on.

We laughed, she invited me down to the bar for a night cap. I accepted, and also the invite later to go to her room with her. Susan was far more aggressive in the bed than my wife had ever been with me and it made me feel alive. She could deep throat, where Maggie couldn't. The feeling of having my member buried in her throat and her tongue flicking on my balls pushed me quickly over the edge. Bringing stars and a dazed look. Next, I knew we were both naked on the bed and she slowly impaled herself on my rigid member. The third act, had me on top with her legs on my shoulders as she slapped at me telling me to go faster and harder.

Finally, exhausted we collapsed side by side and comparisons to what I'd witnessed on the video of my wife and her lover flooded my mind. Maggie had been meek and submissive with me, and passionate and forceful with him. Susan had acted the same, I'd loved it and it left me thinking about what could have been had Maggie just talked to me.

I cried.

Susan took it in her stride, comforted me and then listened to my story afterwards. Talking into the night, talking until the orange light of dawn breaking flooded the hotel room. We then made love, slowly, with passion and a closeness that I'd felt only with Maggie before.