The Wiretap Wife

Eliza found the first orange peel on a Tuesday, curved like a copper smile on her husband's nightstand. Marcus didn't eat oranges. Never had.

Three months earlier, a cable technician had spent six hours installing their new fiber optic connection. He'd been young, with hands that moved too confidently across the junction box in the basement. Marcus had watched him the whole time, asking questions about signal splitters and encryption protocols.

Now, peels appeared weekly. Always when Marcus worked late at the tech firm where he managed data security.

Eliza started spying. She checked his phone—nothing. She followed him after work—he went to a bar alone, drank two fingers of scotch, came home. But the oranges kept appearing, sometimes with fingerprints still pressing into the rind.

The real discovery came accidentally. Their internet slowed down, crawling at dial-up speeds despite the premium package. When the technician returned, Eliza followed him downstairs.

The cable splitter wasn't splitting to their televisions. It ran to a separate server, humming beneath the workbench.

"He's not just managing security," the technician said, checking his clipboard. "He's selling it. Your husband's been running a side business in corporate espionage for years. This setup—he's been mining data from his own company and piping it through your residential connection. Untraceable."

Eliza thought about the late nights. The secrecy. The way Marcus had stopped touching her somewhere around the time the fiber optics arrived.

"Did you know?" she asked later that night, when Marcus walked in carrying—of course—a bag of oranges.

He froze. The bag rustled like dead leaves.

"I did it for us," he said quietly. "The money from the contracts—I was building a future where we wouldn't have to worry about anything."

"You were building a prison," she said.

The next morning, Eliza packed her things. She left the oranges on the counter, arranged in a perfect circle, a surveillance feed of their marriage in citrus form. Somewhere, she knew, Marcus was watching her go through cameras she'd never found. But that was his problem now. She was done being watched.