Dead Signals

Elena had been a zombie for three years before she noticed the cable.

Not the walking dead kind—though the metaphor fit. She'd been sleepwalking through her marriage since the miscarriage, both of them moving through the house like ghosts in a shared haunting. But the cable, barely visible behind the baseboard in the home office—that was new.

It ran from the router to a tiny camera she'd never noticed, tucked between books on the shelf. A spy camera in her own home.

Her hands shook as she traced the wire. Tom was at work—Tom, who still brought her coffee every morning, who held her when she woke crying from dreams of a child who never existed. Tom, who apparently didn't trust her anymore.

Or maybe he never had.

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open. The storm that had been brewing all day finally broke, rain hammering against the glass like accusations.

She remembered their first date—baseball game, bottom of the ninth, both of them soaked by a sudden downpour. They'd laughed like children, running for the inadequate shelter of the concession stand. His hair plastered to his forehead, his shirt transparent, and she'd thought: this. This is the one.

Now she sat at his computer, logged in with his password she'd known since year two, and opened the camera's feed. Hours of footage: her sleeping, her working, her staring out windows she didn't remember opening.

The most recent file was from this morning.

She pressed play.

There she was, zombie-faced and hollow, watching him sleep. And then—she watched herself lean down, press a kiss to his forehead, whisper something too softly for the microphone to catch. She'd never done that. She would never do that.

Unless she had. Unless she did things in her sleepwalking grief that she couldn't remember, tendernesses she couldn't own.

The timestamp jumped. Night after night, same scene: her watching him, her touching him gently, her saying words the audio couldn't quite capture.

She was the spy all along.

The camera hadn't been for surveillance. It had been for proof—proof that somewhere in her deadened body, her love was still alive, still reaching for him in the darkness.