Then Mia, sitting quietly on the couch wrapped in a blanket, said something that stopped the room.
“The cable man came last week.”
Both officers looked at her.
“He said he was fixing the internet.”
The Visit She Had Almost Forgotten
Julia remembered it immediately once Mia said the words.
A technician from a service company had come to the house the previous week. He had been polite, professional, and carried what looked like the right equipment. Julia had let him upstairs to check the router, which happened to be located in Mia’s bedroom.
He had been alone up there for nearly twenty minutes.
At the time Julia had not thought anything of it. Service visits happen all the time. Routers need to be checked. Cables need to be traced. She had been downstairs making coffee and assumed everything was fine.
Now she understood what had happened during those twenty minutes.
The officer who was taking notes looked up.
“We’ll be contacting that company immediately.”
The investigation that followed was handled by the authorities, and the details of what came of it are not fully public. What Julia could share is that the device found beneath Mia’s mattress was a recording unit with a small internal motor that activated when it began its recording cycle.
That motor — that tiny, quiet mechanical motion — was what Mia had been feeling every night.
The mattress was “too tight” because the device was pressing upward from below each time it activated.
The movement Julia saw on the camera at 2:00 a.m. was that same motor cycling through its recording function.
