Who's Watching

### Answers

Later in the week, the stuff from storage arrived. We put the furniture in the appropriate rooms and stored the boxes in the spare bedroom that had been intended for Helen. Well, except for the ones marked as Emily's. These went to her room.

A couple of weekends later, Emily came to me with one of her old laptops. "Dad, I can't seem to get into this computer. Can you help?"

"Why on earth would you want to do that?" I asked, turning from the whiteboard that Helen and I had been using to brainstorm our next game's design. When I say whiteboard, I mean a whole wall of the garage that we'd wallpapered with special paper that made it a whiteboard. And the design, well it had used a large portion of it.

"I want to know what's on it. I've not used this one since before you got shot. It might have something interesting on it."

"Okay," I said, walking to my desk. I then hunted through my draws until I found what I was looking for. A green thumb drive.

We put the drive into her computer's USB port and booted it. Windows started again. So we closed it down again then rebooted, this time bringing up the computer's bios setting and adjusting it so as to boot from the USB drive first.

A Linux based recover system booted. Then, I manually mounted the two hard drive partitions in the system. The first contained the operating system, but the second showed itself to be encrypted. using the recovery system, I reset the password on the admin account for the computer.

We then rebooted the system, and used the new password, password, to access the computer. On the desktop, I saw something that made my stomach churn.

I stared long and hard at my daughter before I spoke next.

"Emily, did you install the camera system in our old house?"

"WHAT?" she screamed. "No. Why in the hell would you think that?"

I pointed to an icon, "that's the software for the system. So, I ask again did you install the cameras or do you know who did?"

"IT WASN'T ME! Dad, if it was..." she started then went silent.

"FUCK!" she screamed after being silent for a while. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! That fucking asshole!"

"Who Emily?"

"Jake Evans."

"Why would you think it was him?" Helen asked.

"I let him use that laptop to access the internet when he came round the house," she told her.

I nodded at that, then turned to the computer and started the software. Pretty quickly a dialogue appeared looking for the encryption key to access the other hard drive. I cancelled that dialogue and the software continued to load. But there was nothing to see. Everything had to be on the other drive.

On a hunch, I opened the user control panel and reset Jake's account password then rebooted and logged in as him.

It seemed I'd got lucky or rather he was a complete idiot. On his desktop sat a file called 'notes.txt', inside that a list of mundane things. Like an appointment for the doctors from four years ago, a couple of porn website URLs with a username and password next to them. At least that's what I assumed them to be.

The exciting bit, at least to me, sat at the bottom of the file. A string of alphanumeric characters. Twenty-six characters long. I highlighted and copied the string then fired up the software again. The normal system interface loaded and where the camera windows would be was a simple message 'No Server Found'.

"So, there nothing here?" Emily asked.

"This is the live interface, it can't find the server to connect too. There. Should. Be," I told them as I searched the program's interface. "There it is."

"What is? Oh my!" Emily said as I clicked on the Library option in the Extras drop-down menu and a series of thumbnails appeared. Below each thumbnail was a date and time stamp. Five images per line, three lines on the screen and a scroll bar that indicated a lot more videos than the fifteen showing currently.

The top-left video showed my former master bedroom. Standing naked at the foot of the bed was Emily's former teacher. Sitting on the bed beside him, my former wife. The video beside it showed the pair in my daughter's bedroom. Next to that another in our bedroom with everyone's favorite couple. The fourth actually contained me and Maggie. The fifth should showed the former teacher and my former wife playing teacher and student in my office in the basement. She had pigtails and the uniform and everything.

The other two lines had the same ratio, four of them, one of me and my wife. I scrolled down a page and saw the same thing. Same for the next few pages in fact. Then there was a series of videos of just me and my wife. I guess I now knew when the affair began.

Scrolling down again, I was shocked to see Terry Mansfield, our next-door neighbour show up in videos. The bitch was a serial cheater.

I began rapidly scrolling down after that. Spotting two other men with my former wife including Jonah Carpenter with his wife Jennifer. Jonah had worked with us, he'd got fired for not putting in the same effort as the rest of us or so I thought. Helen corrected me when she told us, "he got fired when the owner caught his wife in bed with Jennifer."

The last few pages were had to see, Jake's first collected videos were all of him and my daughter. But that slowly petered out and his focus switch exclusively to my wife.

"I'll call the police," I said to break the extended silence after I'd slammed the laptop screen down.

Detective Kevin Griffiths still had the same phone number and though my wife's case had gone cold, he had an interest in trying to close it. He at least felt it offered him a fresh witness, one he remembered I'd asked him about when I'd woken up from my comma. One they hadn't followed up on. He told us to leave it with him and he'd get back to us.

It took him a month.

"Mr Atkinson, is there any chance you can come back to Pennsylvania?" he asked after identifying himself.

"Break in the case?" I questioned.

"We've found your wife. Jake Evans is being charged with so many charges that he might set a state record," came the reply after a small pause.

I looked around the garage come office, Emily, Greg and Helen had all stopped work and were looking at me. I should mention, Emily started to work for us via the co-op program at the University.

"And she wants to see me?" I asked.

"Mr Atkinson, the District Attorney is choosing not to press charges against her."

"WHAT?" I screamed. What moron wouldn't press charges against a woman that they had on video sending her lover to kill me?

"Mr Atkinson. She's not well enough to stand trial. She might not ever be well enough for that. The report we have says never but I like to hope."

"In what way?"

"You have to see for yourself. I really think it might be best if you came back and saw for yourself. Just prepare yourself for the worst."

"Okay, Detective, let me talk with my family and I'll let you know." With that, I said goodbye and hung up.

I then explained what he'd told me to the three people that now crowded around my desk. Helen and Emily felt we should jump on the next plane out. Greg told us to go and he'd hold the fort.

A week later, we followed the directions the Detective gave and arrived at the State Hospital. Reception directed us to the correct ward and the nurse had us wait while she had the Doctor paged.

The doctor took us into an office and began with his a list of her physical injuries. She'd lost one eye, the left one, and broken her right leg and had it heal wrong. They would need to break it again and reset it. Long term malnutrition had caused some problems as well.

That list was long enough when he got to his speciality, it grew much much longer.

The long and short of it, she'd been through long term continual abuse. She has been treated as a sex slave and all-around plaything by a sadistic creep that had her with nothing but time to think to up and enact his every dream. Now, she couldn't cope with being a free human being again. The doctor felt it would be many years before she would be able.

### Epilogue

Helen and I married a year after that trip to see my ex-wife. We married in Florida, on a beach, not far from her parents' home. They welcomed Emily as the daughter they always wanted. She loved having grandparents again. Well for the first time because she didn't remember her natural ones.

Six months after we married, we found out that Helen was pregnant. The ultrasound showed twins, a boy and a girl. We've not settled on names yet, which is a little worrying given they are due next month.

Our first game has proven to be a big success. Great retention numbers, and a high lifetime value. The have the game on a monthly update cycle with a team we hired. Our second game is just about the leave soft launch in Switzerland, South Korea and Denmark. If returns during that match when go worldwide, we'll be expanding again.

I've had to talk Emily into finishing her degree a few times, given she'll be a paper millionaire soon. If she's not already there, I've not looked at the financials lately.

Maggie lives in our basement, Emily wanted that and I couldn't say no. Not with her being Maggie's only living family. Thanks to an agreement with the University of Washington, they are treating her and I teach a class for them on game development. It's actually a win for me, in that I get to see and develop future employees.

Maggie is making progress. We can usually get her to wear clothes all day now. Not that any of us are prepared to test that by taking her anywhere. Last time we tried that it was a five minute trip the local Fred Meyers store. I swear I was just reaching into a refrigerator and she got away from me. She found me, naked with a dog collar around her neck and the leash in her mouth. She literally crawled up to me and rubbed her head against my leg to grab my attention. It took a few hours with the Police to sort everything out.