My Husband Used Our Daughter’s Funeral to Trap Me Forever

I found the rabbit on a Tuesday.

Amelia had called it Mr. Hops. One ear was shorter than the other because she'd loved it too hard, too long, dragging it everywhere until the stuffing settled and one side just gave up. I'd been putting off going into her room for weeks. Every time I reached for the door handle, my hand would stop. Just stop, like a circuit cut.

But I wanted the rabbit. I needed it in a way I couldn't explain to anyone, so I didn't try.

The room still smelled like her. Crayon wax and the strawberry shampoo she insisted on. I stood just inside the door for a moment with my hand pressed flat against the wall, breathing it in. Biscuit came in behind me, slow and quiet, and pressed his flank against my calf.

I found Mr. Hops wedged behind the bottom shelf of her bookcase — between a battered copy of *Corduroy* and the thick rainbow atlas she used to drag into my lap on Sunday mornings, pointing to countries with names she couldn't pronounce yet, asking me what language they spoke there.

I pulled the rabbit free and held it to my chest.

That's when I saw it.

It was small. Smaller than a shirt button. Seated in a drilled hole between the two books, angled slightly downward, angled toward the room. A lens. A tiny, patient eye.

I did not move.

The rabbit was still pressed against my sternum. I could feel my heartbeat against it. I stood there and I breathed, very slowly, and I looked at the lens without touching it.

Then I looked up.

The smoke detector on the ceiling was a standard white disc, the kind in every room of the house. I had changed its battery eight months ago. I had stood on Amelia's step stool to do it, and she had stood below me with her arms out, saying she was spotting me, like she'd seen gymnasts do on TV.

I got up. I crossed the room. I stood directly beneath it.

Another lens. Same size. Angled toward the bed.

I sat down on the floor.

Biscuit came and pressed his chin onto my knee. I put my hand on his head, and we stayed there for a very long time, in my dead daughter's room, under the eye that had been watching her.

I did not cry. I had no idea what I was feeling. It was below crying. It was below words. It was the kind of thing that happens in the body before the mind can catch up — a cold, spreading numbness, like frostbite starting from the inside.

At some point, Brendan called up the stairs.

"Lyd? Dinner's almost ready."

"Be right down," I said.

My voice was perfectly even. I didn't plan it. It just came out that way.

---

I waited until his breathing went slow and regular. Until the bedroom was nothing but his quiet shape under the covers and the faint white noise of the city outside.

Then I slipped out.

My laptop was in my bag in the kitchen, where I'd left it. I took it to the bathroom, locked the door, sat on the tile floor with Biscuit wedged between my hip and the wall. I opened it. I went looking, the way you look when you already know what you're going to find but some part of you is still hoping you're wrong.

I found the application in under ten minutes. It was buried, but not deeply — he hadn't needed to bury it deeply, because he'd never expected me to look. A mirror-tracking program, installed fourteen months ago. Before Amelia died. Before I'd even said the word *divorce* to myself out loud.

Every message to Alexander. Every booking confirmation, every hotel, every restaurant. Every careful, whispered email I'd drafted and deleted and redrafted. All of it. Documented. Date-stamped. Organized into folders with the kind of quiet tidiness that made my stomach turn over.

He had known. For over a year. He had sat across from me at breakfast and asked about my day and held me when I cried at the funeral and slept beside me every night and he had *known*.

I closed the laptop. I sat for a moment with my hands flat on the lid.

Then I got up and went to his study.

The desk drawer was locked. I found the key in the second place I looked — taped to the underside of the pencil cup, which told me everything about how careful he'd thought he needed to be. Inside the drawer were four notebooks. Slim, hardcover, filled edge to edge in his small, precise handwriting.

I read the first page of the first one.

He'd logged my menstrual cycle. My wake times. The particular angle of my expression when I came in from work on Tuesdays — *less eye contact, slight jaw tension, consistent with post-contact affect,* he'd written. My "deviations." That was the word he used. Deviations. As though I were a variable in an equation. As though I were a thing that was supposed to hold still.

I put the notebook back. I locked the drawer. I replaced the key.

I went back to the bathroom floor.

Biscuit was waiting exactly where I'd left him. He put his head in my lap, his warm weight deliberate and steady, and I sat with my hand in his fur and tried to think clearly.

I couldn't call Alexander from the house. Not tonight. I didn't know what was tapped and what wasn't, and I couldn't afford to be wrong.

I took out my notebook. The worn one, the cracked leather, the one I'd been using since before I knew I would need it for something like this. I wrote for three minutes. Everything. The lens in the bookcase. The smoke detector. The application and its dates. The journals and the word *deviations* and the locked drawer and the taped key.

I tore the page out carefully, along the seam.

I folded it twice and went to the coat closet in the front hall and slid it into the lining of my winter coat, into the split seam I'd been meaning to sew up for two years. I pressed it flat with my thumb.

Then I went back to bed.

Brendan was still sleeping. His face was slack and ordinary in the dark, the face of a man I had kissed good morning ten thousand times, and I lay beside him with my eyes on the ceiling and felt the thing I'd been circling all night finally arrive and settle in my chest.

Fear.

Not the fluttering kind. Not anxiety. Something older and quieter than that. The kind that changes how you see a pair of hands. I looked at his hands on the pillow between us, still and relaxed, and I understood that I had never once been afraid of Brendan Reed before tonight.

I understood something else, too.

That I had to be at that breakfast table in five hours. That I had to pour his coffee and ask about his Tuesday and perform every ordinary minute of the morning without a single visible seam. That this was the only plan I had right now and it had to be enough.

Biscuit jumped up and curved himself against the back of my knees.

I closed my eyes.

I did not sleep.