After Brent left that evening, Jeremiah made a ham sandwich and nibbled at it absently as he took a closer look at Mel’s painting on the living room wall. All this time, he’d looked at it with a casual distaste when he bothered to notice it at all. Now that he knew who the artist was, he felt obliged to at least give it a second chance. He’d never understood the appeal of abstract art. If someone put that much effort into a painting, he thought, it ought to at least resemble something familiar. To his eyes, this still looked like a jumble of circles, something a child might draw. They ranged in size from a dime to a dinner plate, painted in grays and deep blues. Some overlapped, some seemed to recede into the distance. Some were bordered in sharp lines, others had edges that bled into the background.

He positioned himself a few feet from the wall and stood there for a few minutes, tilting his head and squinting at it, but he couldn’t recognize any form in the thing. If it was supposed to elicit something from him, he didn’t know what it was, other than a slight sense of vertigo. Moving closer, he noticed there were places where the brush had pulled the paint up from the canvas in tiny ridges. Maybe it was meant to be tactile, he decided, and began to run his fingertips over it.

It was then that he noticed, camouflaged perfectly in the center of a tiny gray circle, the smooth glass lens of a camera. It had been almost imperceptible before. But when he saw the glint of it, he knew instantly what it was. He immediately pulled back his hands and took an unsteady step backward, turning his gaze away, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. In the grips of that absurd sense of guilt, Jeremiah sidestepped over to the bookshelf, out of the camera’s view, and pretended to busy himself with the books. Every time he looked back at the painting now, his eye went directly to the camera lens, pulled there despite his best efforts. Now that he’d found it, it was the only thing he could see.

He wondered vaguely if there were other cameras hidden anywhere. Not likely in this room, he decided. The position of the painting would have offered a clear, sidelong view of Jeremiah as he sat in front of the monitor each day to watch his clone. He figured that was probably the thing Charles Scott wanted to see.

Still, he found himself examining the room, casually lifting books, fingering baseboards and checking the bulbs in every light fixture. He found nothing. A quick scan of the kitchen, with all its smooth, steel surfaces, offered no evidence of any additional devices. Even a tiny lens would have been readily visible in there, especially now that he was looking for it.

Finally, he retreated to his bedroom, quickening his pace slightly as he passed by the painting, and examined every corner of that room. After an hour, when he’d found nothing, he switched off the lights and climbed into bed, where he spent a fitful night tossing and turning, unable to shake the feeling he was being watched.