It is an older phone, scratched screen, cheap case, battery at 18 percent.
You turn it on.
No passcode.
A cold clarity washes through you. Men who believe themselves clever often grow careless inside their own hidden systems. They begin to assume the very people protecting them are too trusting to look.
The phone holds no real names in its contacts—only initials. But it is the photo gallery that makes your mouth go dry.
Screenshots.
Women from social media. Some from church pages, some from neighborhood events, some from family gatherings. Cropped images. Zoomed-in waists. Faces. Mouths. One blurry photo taken from behind
in a grocery store line. Another of Lucía on the roof hanging laundry, clearly captured from inside the house through a window.
Your hand trembles.
At the bottom of the gallery is a three-second video. It begins dark and unfocused, then sharpens just enough to show a bedroom door slightly open in the dark. The camera edges closer. The clip cuts.
You do not need to ask which room.
You send everything to yourself before you can think too deeply about what it means. Then you place the phone back
exactly as it was and leave just as the shower turns off.
That night, you tell Lucía on the roof.
She covers her face with both hands. “I told myself maybe I was imagining it.”
“You weren’t.”
“Did he record inside?”
