JACE'S POV
They put me on cameras after my conversation with Claire. It was at a depot two miles from the house proper, a low concrete building with a loading bay on one side and a chain-link fence on the other. I understood immediately, without anyone needing to explain it to me, that this was not a job so much as a place to put a man they hadn't decided what else to do with yet.
I did not mind it as much as I probably should have. There is a particular relief in being looked at by no one. After a decade of being looked at by everyone, a bank of monitors asks nothing of your face at all. I sat in a windowless room with eleven screens and a logbook, and I watched trucks come and go. I told myself, that this was simply what the rest of my life was going to look like now, small, quiet, unremarkable, and considerably safer than the alternative I'd already survived once by accident.
The depot ran three shifts, a rotating handful of guards and drivers and one dispatcher who spoke to no one if she could help it. I settled into the rhythm of it faster than I expected to. The job required nothing of me beyond attention and silence, both of which I had an almost bottomless supply of.
I did not make friends there. I made careful, minimal acquaintances. I understood, almost instinctively, that every relationship he formed in this place was a relationship someone else could eventually use as leverage against me. So, I kept every one of them exactly as shallow as that understanding required.
In the beginning, I thought that the work itself would be the hardest part; watching the same eleven feeds for twelve hours at a stretch, the particular numbing boredom of a job built almost entirely around the absence of anything happening. I was wrong within the first week.
The hardest part was the quiet, the long stretches with nothing to do but think, and thinking, for a man who had just watched a murder and lost everything he understood his life to be within the space of a single terrible hour, was considerably more dangerous than boredom ever could have been.
I started keeping the tally, I think, partly because I needed something else to think about.
I noticed the gap in my second week. I noticed it the same way I used to notice a photographer favoring one angle over another without quite admitting to himself why. Not through any particular diligence, but because I was paid to notice exactly the kind of small, repeated thing most people trained themselves not to see.
Camera four covered the loading bay on the east side, the one where the trucks came in that didn't match the manifests on the other cameras' trucks. Heavier on the axles, later at night, trucks waved through by men who didn't bother logging them the way they logged everything else.
Camera four went dark for ninety seconds, every so often, always during one of those trucks' visits, always at a slightly different time within the visit itself, as though whoever was doing it had learned, at some point, not to make the gap predictable enough for a bored man with eleven screens to notice.
I noticed anyway.
I started keeping a private tally in the back pages of the logbook, disguised as nothing, dates and times that meant nothing to anyone who didn't already know what they were counting. I did not tell anyone. I did not fully understand why I was keeping the tally at all. I think maybe some old, stubborn part of me had never been able to leave a discrepancy alone once I'd noticed it. That part of me had apparently survived a warehouse, a beating, and five months of captivity fully intact.
~
I understood, by the fourth occurrence, that I someone had noticed me observing. It was Reeve. The man who ran the depot's night shift. He was a heavyset man with the stillness of someone who'd done considerably worse things than run a loading dock and wanted you to know it without having to say so directly.
He found me alone at the monitors on a Tuesday, leaning against the doorframe the way a man leans when he wants you to understand he's blocking your only easy exit, and said, conversationally, the way you'd mention weather, "You spend a lot of time looking at that loading bay."
"It's one of eleven screens," I said. "I look at all of them."
"You look at that one longer." He came further into the room, unhurried, and I understood, that this was a man who knew. "Some things are better left unwatched, boy." He spat,"I'd hate for you to strain yourself over nothing."
I did not ask him what he thought I'd noticed. I understood, with the same floating clarity I remembered from a different, worse night, that asking would only confirm I had something worth asking about, and that whatever I'd stumbled into, the safest available move was the one I'd learned in a hundred rooms before this one, go quiet, go small, give him nothing to react to.
"I hadn't noticed I was doing it," I said. "I'll be more careful."
He studied me a moment longer than the answer required, like he was deciding if my lie was worth calling. "See that you are," he said finally, and left.
I sat very still for a long time afterward, listening to my own pulse in my ears. I had just been threatened by a man who hadn't once raised his voice to do it. I did, however, not stop tracking the gap.
I was afraid, genuinely afraid, in a way I hadn't let myself be since the warehouse, but I kept the tally anyway, in smaller and more careful handwriting. Some part of me had apparently decided, to just do it. I did not examine that decision very closely at the time. I have had considerably more time since to understand what it actually meant.
In the weeks that followed, Reeve found reasons to be near me. He'd find small, unremarkable reasons. He'd take his break at the monitors instead of the break room. He'd ask, mild as anything, whether I'd noticed the new driver rotation, whether the east bay's schedule had changed any, questions dressed carefully enough to pass as ordinary conversation between two men who shared a shift. Except that I understood, every time, exactly what he was actually asking. He wanted to know if I was still counting. He wanted me to understand that he knew I was.
Over time, I got better at lying to him than I was entirely comfortable with. I told him, when he asked, that I'd stopped paying the east bay any particular mind. I told him that after watching eleven screens for twelve hours a day, I stopped seeing any of them individually. It was true enough of most nights to be believable, and false enough of the nights that mattered that I understood I was gambling, every time I said it, on him not having a way to check.
I nearly told someone else first, because I think it says something about how frightened I actually was by then, whatever composure I managed to keep in front of Reeve himself. There was a day driver, a heavyset woman named Lina who ran the morning routes and had never once treated me like anything other than a coworker rather than whatever else the rest of the depot's staff seemed to understand me to be, and I came close, one slow afternoon, to simply telling her what I'd noticed and letting her decide what to do with it. I didn't, in the end. I understood, turning the impulse over, that handing the information to someone with no actual power to protect either of us would only double the number of people Reeve might eventually decide were a problem worth solving, and I had already decided, by then, that whatever this was, I intended to carry it alone until it either resolved itself or got me killed.
~
I stayed late, alone, the graveyard shift I'd started volunteering for specifically because it gave me longer, uninterrupted stretches at the east bay's monitor without anyone else in the room to notice which screen I kept returning to.
Reeve found me there past midnight, and I understood, the moment he came through the door, that this was not going to be another conversation about how much time I spent watching one particular camera. He didn't say anything at first. He crossed to the desk, picked up the logbook I'd left open, and read it slowly, deliberately, while I sat very still and did the same arithmetic I'd been doing since the warehouse, how many exits, how far, how fast, what the odds actually were for a man with nowhere left in the world to run to.
"You've got a careful hand," he said finally, setting the book down. "Careful enough that I nearly missed it, the first few times I went looking. I didn't miss it the fourth time."
"I don't know what you think you found."
"Don't do that," he said, and something in his voice had lost the patience it usually wore like a second skin. "I've been considerably more generous with you than the situation probably called for, because I didn't see the profit in making a problem out of a man who mostly kept to himself. I'm running out of reasons to keep being generous."
I did not answer him, because I understood, in that moment, that any answer I gave would either be a lie he could see through or a truth I couldn't afford to hand him, and neither option improved my odds of walking out of that room the same way I'd walked in.
"Here's what happens next," he said, when my silence had stretched long enough to satisfy him that I understood the seriousness of it. "You stop keeping whatever record you've been keeping. Tonight. And you never once mention this conversation to anyone who asks you why you look considerably more nervous than a man watching cameras ought to look. Are we understood."
"We're understood," I said, and meant, in that moment, to actually mean it, to burn the tally, to go quiet, to survive the only way I'd ever reliably known how to survive anything, by giving people exactly the version of compliance they wanted until they stopped watching closely enough to notice it wasn't real.
I did not burn it. I think it says something true about whatever had already started shifting in me by then, some stubborn refusal I hadn't fully located the source of yet. I moved the tally instead, smaller still, folded into the lining of a jacket I never let out of my sight, and told myself I would decide what to do with it once I understood who, exactly, I could safely hand it to.
I would give this information to someone who mattered, and they would deal with Reeves. Whatever the outcome, he will be away from me. That's all I want. The only issue was that I had no way to get this information to anyone that mattered. A part of me wanted to give up, but some old, stubborn part of me had never been able to leave a discrepancy alone wouldn't let me stop. That part of me had apparently survived a warehouse, a beating, and five months of captivity fully intact. So, I leaned into the instinct to trust it again.