Chapter 3 - The House That Never Slept
The Mercer house had twenty-seven windows, fourteen motion sensors, eight exterior cameras, and not one place where Rachel felt unwatched.
Tyler had installed the security system two years earlier after claiming someone had tried to enter the garage. No police report existed, but the cameras remained. They watched the front door, the kitchen, the pool gate, the nursery hallway, and even the landing outside the primary bedroom.
“The system protects us,” Tyler said whenever Rachel objected.
From what, he never explained.
The first week home with Noah passed in fragments.
Rachel fed him, changed him, slept for minutes at a time, and woke with the sensation that someone had been standing beside the bed. Tyler moved into the guest room because Noah’s crying affected his meetings. During the day, a housekeeper came for three hours, but Tyler dismissed her after Rachel asked whether she had seen anyone enter the nursery overnight.
“You’re frightening the staff,” he said.
Diane visited every afternoon.
She brought food, checked Rachel’s incision, washed bottles, and wrote feeding times in a notebook because Tyler claimed Rachel was forgetting them.
On the sixth day, Diane opened the refrigerator and found six identical glass bottles of green juice.
“Who made these?”
“Tyler ordered them.”
Diane lifted one toward the light. A pale residue clung to the bottom.
“Do they taste strange?”
“Everything tastes strange.”
Diane poured one into the sink.
Rachel caught her wrist. “Don’t. He’ll know.”
The fear in her voice stopped them both.
Diane lowered the bottle.
“What will he do?”
Rachel looked toward the camera above the kitchen doorway.
“I don’t know.”
That evening, Tyler returned with Vanessa.
Neither had called.
Vanessa carried garment bags into the living room while Tyler opened a bottle of wine.
“We have the foundation gala tomorrow,” he said. “Vanessa’s stylist is using the guest suite.”
Rachel sat on the sofa with Noah asleep against her shoulder.
“You said you’d stay home.”
“I said I’d try.”
“You promised.”
Tyler’s jaw tightened.
Vanessa stepped between them with a soothing smile. “Rachel, you need rest. Tyler needs to keep the business stable. Newborns are expensive.”
Rachel stared at her.
“My parents left me enough money to raise ten children.”
The room changed.
Tyler set down the wine bottle.
Rachel’s inheritance had always been the unspoken center of their marriage. Her parents had died in a small plane crash when she was twenty-four, leaving her controlling interest in Cole Aeronautics, several properties, and a trust that released funds in stages.
Tyler managed none of it officially.
He had spent years trying.
Vanessa removed her sunglasses.
“No one was talking about your trust.”
“You were.”
Tyler crossed the room and took Noah from Rachel’s arms.
She reached for the baby instinctively.
“I’m putting him down,” he said.
“I can do it.”
“You can barely stand.”
Rachel rose anyway. Pain cut across her abdomen. The room tilted.
Tyler watched without helping.
Vanessa poured a glass of green juice and held it out.
“Drink this before you fall.”
Rachel smelled something bitter beneath the apple and celery.
“No.”
Tyler’s voice dropped. “Rachel.”
“No.”
The baby stirred in his arms.
Diane, standing near the kitchen island, quietly took out her phone and began recording.
Tyler saw her.
His face went blank.
“Leave.”
“She asked me to be here.”
“This is my house.”
Rachel pressed one hand to the sofa to stay upright. “It’s my house.”
The words escaped before she could stop them.
Tyler moved closer.
The smile he wore for cameras was gone.
“Then perhaps you should start acting like you deserve it.”
Diane stepped between them.
“Give her the baby.”
For several seconds, no one moved.
Then Tyler handed Noah to Diane, not Rachel.
He took Diane’s phone from her hand so quickly that she did not react in time.
“You don’t record inside my home.”
He deleted the video, opened the recently deleted folder, and erased it again.
Diane’s anger frightened even Rachel.
“You think deleting a video deletes what happened?”
Tyler handed back the phone.
“No,” he said. “But it removes the version you planned to invent.”
After Diane left, Rachel locked the nursery door.
At two in the morning, she woke in the rocking chair with Noah in the crib and no memory of walking upstairs.
On the floor beside her lay a syringe cap.
It did not belong to any medication prescribed by her doctor.
May you like
She hid it inside the lining of the diaper bag.
In the morning, it was gone.
