Transmission

The palm of her hand still carried the heat from his face when she found it — a single cable snaking behind the baseboard, connected to nothing she recognized.

"What is this?" Elena asked, her voice flat.

Marcus didn't look up from his phone. "Ethernet extension. The WiFi in here sucks."

She'd believed him for three months. Believed the late nights at the office, the encrypted files on his laptop, the sudden interest in her company's upcoming merger. Now she knew better. The cable ran to a listening device smaller than her thumb.

Her father had read palms in Havana before the revolution — taught her that hands revealed everything a person wanted to hide. She'd stopped believing in that mysticism years ago, traded it for data analytics and quarterly projections. But standing in their bedroom, Marcus's phone lighting up with encrypted messages, she understood what her father had meant.

The lines on a person's palm told you where they'd been. The way they held their hands told you where they were going. And Marcus — with his venture capital firm and his vague clients — had been holding his hands like a man waiting to be paid.

"Who do you work for?" she asked.

"Baby, you're tired. Let's talk about this tomorrow."

"Tomorrow morning, I walk into the board meeting and tell them your firm has been spying on us for months. Then I call the DOJ."

His expression changed — something like admiration, something like hate. "You're smarter than I gave you credit for."

"I'm exactly as smart as you paid for." She unplugged the cable. "Get out."

Later, she sat on the balcony watching the palm trees sway in the wind, thinking about how some people spent their whole lives trying to read others, while others just found the cable and followed it wherever it led.