Chapter 5 - The Watch on Travis’s Wrist
Downtown, Travis sat at the head of a conference table while three executives argued over quarterly numbers.
He heard none of it.
His watch had vibrated once.
A message preview appeared.
Help me.
Then it vanished.
Travis stared at the screen.
He opened his phone.
No message.
He called Brooke.
Straight to voicemail.
He called again.
Nothing.
His mother answered on the third call.
“Travis, you’re working.”
“Where’s Brooke?”
“Sleeping.”
“She sent me a message.”
A pause.
“What message?”
“Put her on.”
“She’s exhausted.”
“Mom.”
Lorraine sighed.
“She has been emotional all morning. She nearly dropped the baby.”
Travis stood so abruptly his chair rolled backward.
“What?”
“I caught her in time.”
“Put Brooke on the phone.”
“She is not in a condition to speak.”
Travis ended the call.
His business partner, Daniel, looked up.
“What happened?”
“My wife needs me.”
Travis drove home without calling again.
Lorraine had lied only once to him before.
At least, only once that he knew of.
When he was seventeen, she had told him his father abandoned them.
Years later, after his father died, Travis discovered letters Lorraine had hidden.
His father had begged to see him.
Lorraine claimed she had done it to protect him.
Travis had forgiven her.
But he had never forgotten the feeling of holding those letters and realizing his life had been shaped by a lie.
As he turned into his neighborhood, he opened the nursery camera app.
The live feed showed nothing.
Camera offline.
He checked the system log.
The camera had been unplugged at 8:14 a.m.
But below that notification was another line.
Backup recording active.
Travis’s hands tightened around the wheel.
The backup camera had no live view.
It uploaded only when the main unit lost power.
He would need the home server to access it.
He parked crookedly in the driveway.
The front door was unlocked.
Upstairs, Jonah was crying.
Then he heard his mother’s voice.
“Crawl farther.”
May you like
Travis ran.
👉 By the time Travis reached the nursery, Lorraine had almost completed the scene she planned to use against Brooke—but she had not expected him to arrive before she hid the final piece.
