Part I — The Gift
My husband gave me a smartwatch for my thirty-third birthday.
The next morning, I carried it to work and set it down on the sleek glass table in the break room, more out of habit than excitement. It was pretty enough—rose-gold casing, expensive leather band, the sort of thing that looked polished in a filtered photo and meaningless in real life.CRSAID
My coworker David picked it up.
David had once worked signals intelligence for the Marines, and he never looked at any piece of hardware the way ordinary people did. He did not admire the color. He did not comment on the design. He turned the watch over, squinted at the tiny serial number tucked near the charging port, and went absolutely still.
Then the color drained out of his face.
He leaned across the table and lowered his voice until it was barely more than air.
“You need to call the police right now,” he said.
I stared at him.
He swallowed hard.
“This isn’t a consumer device. This is a military-grade cloning bug. Whoever gave this to you is pulling a live mirror of your phone, your email, your location, and ambient audio.”
I looked at the watch.
Then I looked back at David.
I did not gasp. I did not flinch. I did not drop it like it might burn me.
Instead, I reached across the table, took the watch from his hand, and fastened it around my left wrist.
“I know,” I said quietly, tapping the screen awake. “Let him listen.”
David just stared.
He looked like a man who had prepared himself for panic and had no idea what to do with composure.
But hidden systems were my specialty.
I was an IT data auditor. My job was to find what other people buried, trace what other people disguised, and follow numbers until they confessed. If my husband wanted to play digital chess with my life, I was willing to let him make the first move.
Then I was going to clear the board.
Three days later, I sat in my mother-in-law’s dining room while crystal clinked softly under warm chandelier light and the scent of roasted lamb drifted through the air.
Patricia sat at the head of the long mahogany table like a woman who believed a title could be inherited through force of posture alone. To her right sat my husband, Richard, slowly turning a glass of Cabernet in one hand.
He was the family’s golden son. The founder. The visionary. The CEO of a tech startup that was supposedly only weeks away from a major Series B funding round.
