The email lands at 5:12 a.m., the hour when the lake is quiet and the house pretends to be kind. I’m awake because the clock under my ribs won’t quit. The subject line says Fertility Window — Day 12, and the preview text stings: alert shared with caregiver.
“Show me the guts,” I whisper to the screen. My finger hovers. I don’t open it in the pretty client; I open it like evidence, plain text, headers expanded to bone. The smell of cedar drifts from the closet, patient and staged. In the pane, the routing blooms: From bracelet@wellasense.io; To admin@rookfoundation.org; Cc jr.assistant@rookfoundation.org; X-Shared-With: caregiver: julian.rook; X-Device-ID: RB-09F2; X-User-Profile: lcalder; and the worst: X-Event: ovulation_predicted.
I take a breath in and taste copper, like I licked a battery in middle school to test if it worked. I take screenshots of the header chain and shoot a short screen recording that scrolls through every field, the cursor moving slow enough to convict. I whisper the code phrase out of superstition—“the lake dropped two inches”—and the words balance me on their hard edge.
“You told his admin,” I say to the email. “You told him.” The house doesn’t answer. The lake outside shows ribs where water used to cover stone. Somewhere a gull heckles the rocks. My hands shake—not outward, just along the line where finger meets touchpad—so I steady them on the desk’s cool wood. I open my spiral and write the time. Then I write: Alert shared with caregiver. My throat clicks.
I don’t ping Tamsin. I don’t ping anyone. I talk to the machine that snitched.
I walk to the closet. The drawer breathes a soft blue behind its cedar smell. The bracelet coils on its puck like a pet bred for obedience. The charger’s base bears a tiny rook silhouette—branding tucked into kindness. “You told him,” I say, and I don’t care that I’m saying it out loud to plastic.
“He configured you,” I add. “I didn’t consent to caregivers.” The word care curdles cleanly in my mouth.
I lift the bracelet. It’s cool against my palm, skin oils already polishing the surgical steel to a truth I never wanted to reflect. At the band’s underside, the sensor window is a small, blind eye. I bring it to the kitchen where the router crouches under the island, all teeth and lights.
The neighborhood smells like ozone when it rains; my kitchen smells like it’s been rinsed in the same weather. The floor is cool, the hum is low, and the only warm thing is my chest, which is not a metaphor, it is biology and fear.
“We work quickly,” I tell the empty house. I log into the router with the admin profile I made the night I found the server racks. The UI is ugly, honest. I pull the client list and sort by vendor. Wellasense pops with the smugness of correct capitalization. I read the MAC address twice: A4:B2:6C:11:9F:02. I take a photo with my phone and another with the old air-gapped one, then one more with the point-and-shoot I keep for when metadata needs a different signature.
“Smile,” I say to the address. I capture the DHCP lease times, the signal strength, the last handshake. My fingers move without me, the way they did when I learned to lace new shoes without looking down. Every click is a receipt. I block the MAC with a rule that reads like a closed door: Deny: A4:B2:6C:11:9F:02 outbound. I block the OUI range too, because vendors breed siblings. I take screenshots of the rule page, the timestamp, the confirmation toast that says Rule Applied like this is a kitchen, not a battlefield.
The bracelet buzzes once in my hand, indignant. “No,” I say, and I feel the word physically, a lid clicking shut.
Micro-hook #1 wedges under my ribs: If the alert already left, who reads it first—his admin or Hale—and how fast can they aim a clipboard at my door?
I open a terminal and ping the device’s local IP. Nothing answers. I try again, slower, like I’m coaxing a hurt animal out from under a porch. No response. I scroll to Logs; traffic drops to silence for the Wellasense range. I pull one more screenshot. I print to PDF and to actual paper—ugly gray, but admissible—and slide the sheet under my spiral. I timestamp it in ink. I lick my lips; the taste is coffee gone old and the metallic aftershock of adrenaline.
“You still talk to your mother ship over LTE?” I ask the bracelet. I check the model page I cached last month; it boasts Wi-Fi primary, cellular failover “for safety.” I open the drawer where I keep a chip bag’s worth of Faraday fabric and wrap the band for a moment, a dry whisper of foil over hunger.
I don’t keep it wrapped. That would tip the house. The choreography matters: block, photograph, hash, replace.
I wipe the bracelet with a microfiber cloth like I’m cleaning a lens. I hold the band gently and speak to it like it’s a dog trained to fetch secrets. “You are going to sit still,” I say. “You are going to look obedient. You are not going to tattle.”
My phone trembles; a different email pings: HOA Amenities Survey—Final Reminder. I laugh once, a short bark that tastes like burnt sugar. I screenshot the subject line because it is proof of a culture: the listserv that polices strollers on sidewalks while praising “child-neutral amenities.” I tuck it beside the fertility alert. They hang together like exhibit labels in a donor salon—mission on the wall, bodies in the back room.
Back at the desk, I open the fertility email one more time and scroll slowly through the headers, the way I’d teach a jury to read. I whisper through the fields: “Received: by mx1.rookfoundation.org; DKIM: pass; X-Shared-With: caregiver: julian.rook.” My voice shakes on his name. I don’t delete. I don’t forward. I save the .eml and its .meta twin to if_then with a version hash. I print the first page and watch the ink darken caregiver into a bruise.
“Alert shared with caregiver.”
“Caregiver,” I say again, softer, tasting the gall in the word. Love asks for trust; here, care asks to be a credential. My shoulders lift; my body makes itself taller, like I can step out of a net by remembering I am longer than their reach.
The band in my hand is warm now. I feel the thrum of a tiny haptic, the ghost of a pulse it cannot own. I walk it back to the cedar drawer. The smell rises—closets and money and that staged comfort I have to wear like perfume in public. I glance at my wrist, bare as a protest sign. I hold the charger’s puck steady and set the bracelet down. The rook silhouette on the base watches me.
“Back to your leash,” I say. “Act normal.”
The puck lights blue, then white. I hate the satisfaction that color gives me: compliance, faked.
Micro-hook #2 drags at the edge of my calm: If he checks the admin dashboard and sees “connected,” will he assume I’m still wearing it—and what will he do when the outbound graph flatlines?
I close the drawer two-thirds, leave it open just enough to match last night’s photo—the angle, the light spill, the staged normalcy. I scroll to yesterday’s image and check the shadows. The match is good. I take a new picture and store them side by side: Before Block / After Block, identical except for the trail I keep in my devices and the silence I’ve forced into his.
“Router,” I murmur, touching the island’s underside. “You and I are okay?” The logs blink where I left them, small green tidelines. I export a syslog chunk that spans the block window and add it to if_then. I hash anew and write the digest across my spiral margin like a blessing: Proof before permission. Then I cross it out and write the inverse below, because the paradox is the only prayer that fits: Permission to keep proof.
I walk to the big window and look at the lake. The level is low enough to show a black seam of algae on stone. Wind frets the surface; the dam will let the level rise later to please the shoreline cameras. The glass throws my face back at me, thinner than last month. I press my fingertips to the pane; the chill walks into my bones. My reflection blurs where my breath hits, a small human weather system resisting metrics.
“He knew,” I say to the glass. “He set you to share with a caregiver.” My throat tries to close; I force it to be a conduit. “He receives real-time fertility data about my body.” Speaking the sentence costs me something, but I want the sound file in the room. If an auditor ever asks what I knew and when, I want the air to be a witness.
I pull my phone and open a voice memo titled Statement, Personal. “I am describing the header,” I tell the recorder. “X-Shared-With: caregiver: julian.rook. This was sent at 5:12 a.m. to his admin. I have blocked the bracelet’s MAC and OUI ranges at the router and exported logs. The device is returned to charger so home automation reads normal. I have not informed the ‘caregiver.’” My voice snaps on the last word like a matchhead.
Micro-hook #3 bites: If the bracelet fails over to cellular and squeals later, will his team knock with clipboards before my seventy-two-hour freeze can seed?
The house remains arranged: counters wiped, chairs aligned to their magazine-angle, rook-shaped door handle gleaming. I taste stale coffee and wish I’d burned it darker. I pour a new cup and it scalds my tongue in a way that wakes me into the next decision: message Tamsin or hold until the clinic visit. I choose the second because timing is leverage and I need to stack clocks.
I speak to the drawer because I need a target that won’t lie. “I won’t confront him today,” I say. “I’ll confront you.” I tap the puck with a fingernail; the sound is a bright ceramic tick. “You don’t get to write me.”
I take one last photo: the drawer, the blue-white glow, the tiny rook. I annotate it with a small arrow in my spiral: device present. Then I close the drawer fully, smooth, no theatrics—just the soft yawn of cedar and air.
In the office, I compose an email to myself with the header screenshots attached and a subject that will look like trash if opened by the wrong eyes: Q2 Expenses — Receipts Attached. In the body, I write the plain sentence I’m going to need later: On [date/time], the wellness bracelet shared a “fertility window” alert with Julian Rook’s designated caregiver account and his administrative assistant. I BCC an address that forwards to the offsite drive Tamsin and I seeded under the decoy taxes top folder. My fingers are steady now. The rage has cooled into something with edges.
“Autonomy,” I tell the room, “requires privacy.” I hit send. “Proof demands exposure.” I open the if_then folder and watch the files settle. “Love asked for trust; safety requires documentation.” The words are not a manifesto; they are a ledger entry. I log the time in my spiral, because paper forgives delay and screens do not.
The lake pushes a small wave against new stone. The sound is gentle, like hands folding a sheet, and I want to weep for how domestic catastrophe looks when you frame it wide. In the corner of the window, a donor salon photo from last year reflects—the captioned toast about “legacy without heirs,” all smiles and stemware, while I stand in the periphery holding a napkin like a flag I wasn’t allowed to raise.
I pick up my phone, set a silent alarm for the clinic visit under the name Window Wash, and pocket it. I close the laptop, not all the way, just enough to make the camera light die. The house exhales. The drawer glows behind wood and lies.
I ask the question I’m going to have to answer faster than I want: If the caregiver reads the alert before my filing seeds, where will he send his first “concern”—to the woman who might be carrying a variable, or to the girl whose meds make her a variable already?