He wondered if it was the same animals he saw night after night. He tried a few times to study the videos to see if he could tell one from the other, to recognize a familiar snout or rack of antlers, but he could never be sure. In reviewing the daylight recordings, he easily kept track of the different people he regularly observed on the sidewalks in front of his house, and of the expected neighborhood cars that drove by without slowing.

His phone buzzed again in his pocket. The cameras’ sensitivities had been lowered to a balance that hit somewhere between vigilance and sanity, and John had turned down the vibration of his phone to barely there. But he still got so many notifications each day that, through sheer repetition, he’d been trained out of startling at most of them. But this time he flinched.

“John?” His boss for the past three years at BabySafe, Inc. was staring at him with a strange little charged-up look, shocked, as if he’d felt the tingle of the text in his own pocket. Both of the sales managers who relied on John’s projection reports to steer their strategies for rubber spoons and scuff-free safety gates were gaping at him, too. As were the four random worker bees from other departments around the table with them.

John felt the heat in his face of absorbing a sudden salvo of expectant looks.

“Huh? No, I’m good. Sorry. Everything’s fine. I just got a text and my phone startled me. That’s all.”

“No, look,” said his boss.

All their gazes slid past John, over his shoulder and through the conference room’s glass wall. John turned in his chair to follow their attention.

His office was one door to the right of dead center of the conference room’s glass. He’d left it open when he’d walked over for the meeting, and now two uniformed police officers were leaning in, searching the empty room for him.

Every thought evaporated from his head and dragged the roots of his hair to attention as they went. His breath stalled between inhale and exhale, then caught fire in his chest. John watched the police look for him, their starched blue backs filling up his office doorway across the hall. They were only one turn from finding him.

His heart slammed into a full gallop and he forced himself to blink, and to release his grip on the armrests of his chair.