Glass Walls

Miranda stared at the corporate chart on her wall—a pyramid of names, hers somewhere near the middle, forgotten among the ambitious young things climbing over each other. At forty-three, she'd stopped climbing. She'd started surviving.

Her iPhone buzzed. Another notification from that strange app that had appeared yesterday. *Someone is watching you.*

She'd laughed it off as a phishing attempt, but the message kept coming. *Your husband. He knows about the hotel.*

The hotel. The Hampton Inn in Newark, where she'd met Marcus. Not for sex—God, she wished it were that simple. For information. Marcus, with his ragged beard and desperate eyes, had offered her something else: a way out of the pyramid scheme her life had become.

"You're being played," Marcus had told her over stale coffee. "Your husband's division is mining employee data. Selling it. And you're helping him."

She'd denied it. Defended David. But later that night, she'd checked his phone while he slept. Saw the encrypted messages. The IP logs. Her husband wasn't just a middle manager at a data analytics firm. He was a corporate spy, and their marriage was his best cover.

Now the iPhone trembled in her hand like a dying goldfish she'd once won at a carnival, flopping uselessly in its plastic bag. *He installed something on your phone. He's reading everything.*

The office door opened. David walked in, his tie loosened, that gentle smile on his face that she'd trusted for eleven years.

"Everything okay, Mir?"

She looked at him—really looked at him—and saw a stranger wearing her husband's skin. "Fine. Just a work thing."

He nodded and left. She watched him go, feeling the walls of her life closing in, transparent as glass and twice as strong. Somewhere, a surveillance camera recorded them both. Somewhere, her data streamed into servers she'd never see.

The goldfish on her desk swam in endless circles, unaware its bowl was a prison. Miranda turned back to her pyramid chart and wondered if she was any different. She picked up her phone and typed back to the unknown messenger: *Tell me everything.*

Somewhere, data began to move. Somewhere, a marriage began to end.