A few days later, strange little things began to happen—things impossible to prove, yet impossible to ignore. I would leave my keys on the table, and they would end up in my bag. I would close the closet, and in the morning, it would be slightly open. My favorite cup broke one day, though no one admitted to taking it. My husband looked at me with increasing irritation, saying I was nervous, that I was imagining things, that I should be more tolerant because his mother was seriously ill. Every such conversation left me feeling as though I was slowly being pushed into the background in my own home.
I tried to convince myself it was stress, that I was exaggerating. But one thought gave me no peace: why, when I enter the room, does her face instantly become lifeless, but when I leave, I feel like something changes behind my back? The scariest part wasn’t that, but how subtly she influenced my husband without saying a word in my presence. He suddenly started repeating her old phrases, accusing me of coldness, of selfishness, of thinking only about myself. Every time, I caught myself feeling as if someone was carefully, step by step, rewriting reality.
One day I came home earlier than usual and heard him talking on the phone in the other room. His voice was tense, apologetic, as if he were explaining himself to someone senior and more significant. When I entered, the conversation cut off, and he said it was work.
That was when a decision was born in me for the first time, one I hid even from myself: I needed to see what was happening in the house when I wasn’t there. I hesitated for a long time, feeling like a traitor and a victim simultaneously, but the fear of losing myself and my reality proved stronger. I ordered small cameras—ones almost impossible to notice—and installed them while my husband was at work and my mother-in-law, as always, sat motionless in her chair, staring at a single point.
I told myself I was doing this for safety, to monitor her condition. But deep down, I knew: I was looking for confirmation of my feelings or proof that I was going crazy. When everything was ready, I felt a strange relief and, at the same time, a new wave of anxiety, because now the truth, whatever it might be, was very close. I continued living my normal life: cooking dinners, smiling at my husband, carefully adjusting the blanket on my mother-in-law’s legs, but inside me, tension was building, as if I were standing before a door behind which something dangerous was hiding.
Every evening I looked at my phone and put off viewing the recordings, convincing myself I’d do it tomorrow. I was afraid to see something I wouldn’t be able to “unsee,” and afraid to see nothing, because then I’d have to admit my fear lived only in my head. Days passed like this, filled with deaf anticipation, unspoken words, and the feeling that there was a secret in this apartment slowly but inevitably approaching the moment of exposure.
I don’t know how long I sat in front of the screen before I realized my fingers were trembling so hard I could barely hit pause. Everything I saw didn’t fit into any explanation other than the most terrible one…
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