The Last Transmission

Elena had become a spy in her own marriage. It happened gradually—a checked browser history here, a glanced-at notification there—until the monitoring became as automatic as breathing. She knew Mark's passwords better than he did. She tracked his location through the Find My app he'd forgotten to disable.

Their cat, Baudelaire, watched from his perch atop the bookshelf. The animal's yellow eyes followed Elena's movements with unsettling intelligence, as if he knew something she didn't.

"You're pathetic," she whispered to herself.

Yet her fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up Mark's cloud storage. Nothing incriminating. Never anything incriminating. Just spreadsheets, tax documents, mundane emails from coworkers. The absence of evidence was driving her mad. Was she paranoid? Or was he just that good?

The ethernet cable connecting Mark's gaming PC to the router caught her eye. It was new—bright blue against the shadows beneath his desk. He'd claimed his WiFi was unstable, but Elena had never noticed any issues.

She waited until Mark left for his Saturday morning run, then crept into his office. Baudelaire materialized in the doorway, tail twitching. Elena followed the cable from the back of Mark's computer, tracing it across the floorboards, behind the bookshelf, into the wall.

It didn't lead to the router.

Her fingers trembled as she pulled the bookshelf away from the wall. The cable disappeared through a small hole in the drywall, extending into the space between their apartment and the neighbor's unit.

Mark wasn't having an affair. Mark wasn't hiding money. Mark was siphoning their neighbor's internet connection—neighborhood gossip, intercepted emails, maybe more. Her husband, the mid-level actuary, was playing at espionage.

Elena sat on the floor, Baudelaire winding through her legs, and laughed until she cried. She'd spent six months suspecting infidelity, treason, financial ruin—any explanation for Mark's late nights in his office, his hushed phone calls, his sudden interest in cybersecurity.

The truth was so much smaller. So much sadder.

When Mark returned, flushed from his run, Elena was still sitting on the office floor, the blue cable coiled in her lap like a dead snake.

"We need to talk," she said.

Baudelaire blinked, then turned away. He'd seen everything, and none of it mattered to a creature who hunted mice in the walls and slept sixteen hours a day. Some secrets, Elena realized, were only important because you needed them to be.