I heard the fan going as I approached, and the orange chemical smell seemed a little less potent, but Michael wasn’t stripping the wallpaper or rehanging the towel rod. Instead, he seemed to be peering inside the wall, where the brackets for the rod had pulled out a chunk of plaster. His fingers were inside the drywall, groping around. Then he drew back his hand and held it out flat in front of me.

A camera no bigger than a nickel. Tiny, barely more than a lens and a computer chip.

“Who did this?” I touched it with a fingertip, carefully, like it might sting me. Then the implications rippled through me as though I really had been bitten. “Someone was watching us?”

“I don’t know.” His face was grim. “But I don’t think it’s recording right now. Looks inert.”

He set the camera down carefully on the counter and picked up the towel rack and the two brackets that had held it, each a circle secured by four screws. He set the bar and brackets together off to one side.

Then he started patting the floor, collecting the screws.

Frozen, my stomach churning again, I wrapped my arms around myself tightly. We’d been living in some creepy stage set, and every social media troll could be watching a live stream of me panicking right now. Maybe Aimee was watching. Could she have done this? I am calm. I am in control. I can handle this. Michael was concentrating, trying to figure out what was going on. I couldn’t lose my shit.

But I was. I am freaking out.

My knees almost collapsing, I crouched down to be closer to Michael or to hide my face, and together we found one screw, then two, another and another, until the seventh. And that was it. Along the edge of the counter, under the door of the linen closet, behind the base of the toilet. Only seven screws.

Michael said, “The lens must have lined up with a screw hole.”

I’d heard of peepholes in public bathrooms, but this was our house. It felt like someone was standing right behind me, staring at the back of my neck. “Call the police. We should call them. Or the alarm company? Unless someone there did it.”

Michael frowned. “I’m going to check the master bath.”

Just then, my phone buzzed with a text: Y’all want to watch the game?

And he paused. “Is that Lena? See if Brady’s home. We could use some help.”

I texted back: Having an issue. Can you & Brady come over?

There in a sec.

And a few excruciating minutes later—barely enough time for Michael to take off a single towel rack from the master bathroom—the front door opened and Lena called out, “Where are you?”

“Down the hall,” I shouted back.

She and Brady crowded into the bathroom while I explained what we’d found.