The router sat on a small table on the first-floor landing. I aimed the sweeper at every possible place a camera might be. When it became clear that there was nothing there, I exhaled in relief. Zac might still notice the outage, but everyone’s Internet sometimes blipped.

I peered through the flashing red monocle of the camera lens finder, going from room to room, scanning as systematically as I could. I found four tiny red dots. Zac had been spare but targeted, favouring central ceiling positions with the widest vantage points. He had chosen rooms where conversations and activities were most likely to happen, but he had left private spaces, undoubtedly for himself. I was bending my neck to wipe the tops of my cheeks against my arms and blinking hard, angry at myself for crying as the reality hit that he had been using visual surveillance on me.

One camera was tucked in the sitting room’s chandelier. It made me remember my first night with him, making love beneath it. As I suspected, another was in the kitchen, in the middle of the track lighting, which confirmed how he watched me hide my orange journal. The third was in the main hallway, which would ensure he saw whoever came in and out of the house, and also took in the cupboard under the stairs – so that was how he’d caught me with the suitcases.

The fourth camera was in the pendant that hung above our bed.

My hand was visibly shaking as I switched the router on again, but my stomach was a tight ball of fury. I tried to calm my breathing as I went to the camera-free zone of the baby’s empty room, taking along some scatter cushions from the sitting room. I piled them in a corner and made myself as comfortable as I could.

There was that saying about fighting fire with fire, though I was no longer sure which of us was first to light the flames. I did know he had been spying and me, and I intended to spy right back. I would not sit and weep myself into a crumbling wreck over the camera he’d trained on our bed.

I got to work on the recording, reducing the distortion, sharpening the clarity, fine-tuning still more before finishing off with the amplification tool. I relaxed into the cushions, rested my hands on my lower belly in the hope that I would feel her move again, and listened.

It was Scarlett’s voice first, picked up mid-sentence – ‘to the police but they didn’t want to know.’ Scarlett paused. ‘Are you going to tell her?’

There was a small gasp and I realised I had inadvertently recorded myself, capturing my elation at feeling my baby kick for the first time.