I grabbed my phone, my fingers trembling so hard I nearly dropped it. I called her once. Twice. Five times. It went straight to voicemail every single time.
I checked the bedroom. Her side of the bed was perfectly made—unusually so. I checked the closet. It looked full, but in my panicked state, I couldn’t tell if her favorite dresses were missing. My mind began to spiral into the dark places a long-distance marriage often invites: Did I work too much? Was she lonely? Who was she with?
Then, I remembered the camera.
Three months ago, after a string of break-ins in our neighborhood, I had installed a tiny, discreet security camera tucked into the molding above the front door. I hadn’t mentioned it to Elena—not to be secretive, but because I’d finished the setup late at night and simply forgot to bring it up in the whirlwind of my travel schedule.
I pulled up the app on my phone, my heart hammering against my ribs. I scrolled back the timeline to eight hours ago, then ten.
The video flickered to life. At 10:15 AM, I saw Elena. She wasn’t packing a suitcase. She wasn’t crying. In fact, she looked… frantic. She was pacing the hallway, clutching her phone to her ear. She looked exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes I hadn’t seen on our last FaceTime call.
Suddenly, she dropped the phone and ran toward the kitchen. A minute later, she came back into the frame carrying a small, plastic carrier.
My heart stopped. It was the carrier for Barnaby, our aging golden retriever.
I watched as she struggled to lift the heavy, limp dog into the carrier. Barnaby wasn’t moving. Elena was sobbing now—I could see her shoulders shaking even on the low-res footage. She scrawled something on a piece of paper, slapped it on the table, and bolted out the door, struggling with the weight of the carrier.
The realization hit me like a wave of cold water. The “Goodbye!” wasn’t for me.
I didn’t even close the front door. I sprinted back to my car and drove like a madman to the 24-hour emergency vet three miles away.
When I burst through the clinic doors, I saw her. She was sitting in the corner of the waiting room, her head in her hands, her clothes stained with grass and dirt. When she looked up and saw me, she didn’t say a word. She just collapsed into my arms and drifted into a fit of messy, relieved tears.
“I thought he was gone, David,” she whispered into my coat. “He collapsed this morning. I couldn’t reach you. I had to leave the note in case you got home before I did, but I was so rushed… I just wrote the first thing I thought.”
We spent the next four hours in that waiting room, holding hands in a way we hadn’t in years. The “Goodbye” I had feared turned into a “Not yet.”
The vet eventually came out with a tired smile. Barnaby had suffered a severe heat stroke combined with a reaction to some new heart medication, but they had stabilized him. He was going to be okay.
When we finally got home that night, Barnaby was groggy but wagging his tail. I walked over to the kitchen table and picked up the note.
“Goodbye! (Taking Barnaby to the ER—Phone is dead! Love you!)”
The bottom half of the paper had been folded under a heavy fruit bowl. In my blind panic, I had only seen the first word.
I sat down and looked at my wife, who was already falling asleep on the couch with her hand resting on the dog’s head. I realized then that the camera hadn’t just shown me the truth about the note—it had shown me the strength of the woman I nearly doubted.
I walked over to the camera, unplugged it, and tossed it in the drawer. I didn’t need to watch her from a distance anymore. I just needed to be home.
A man I didn’t recognize—tall, wearing a heavy dark coat that seemed out of place for the weather—was standing in our foyer. They weren’t arguing. In fact, the way they stood was worse: they were whispering, their heads pressed close together in a way that suggested a terrifying intimacy.
I watched, breathless, as Elena handed him a thick manila envelope. He tucked it into his coat, leaned in, and kissed her forehead. It wasn’t the kiss of a lover; it was the kiss of someone saying a final, tragic farewell.
Then, the man looked up.
My blood turned to ice. He didn’t just look up—he looked directly at the camera. He knew it was there. He smiled, a slow, chilling pull of the lips, and mouthed three words: “Thanks for everything.”
In the video, the man exited the front door. Elena stood frozen for a full minute, staring at the closed door. Then, she walked to the kitchen table, picked up a pen, and wrote the note.
“Goodbye!”
But as I watched her walk out of the frame toward the back of the house, I noticed something I had missed in my initial panic. She wasn’t carrying a suitcase. She wasn’t carrying anything at all.
I looked back at the live feed. The house was still, just as I’d left it minutes ago. But a sudden, sharp realization hit me: if she hadn’t left through the front door, and her car was still in the driveway… she was still in the house.
I dropped my phone. The screen cracked, the video of the smiling man frozen in the shards of glass.
In the heavy silence of the living room, I heard it. A faint, rhythmic thud-thud-thud coming from beneath my feet. It was coming from the basement—a part of the house we only used for storage, a place I hadn’t checked because the door had been locked from the outside.
I walked toward the basement door, my hand trembling as I reached for the deadbolt. Why would she lock it from this side?
I turned the latch. The wood creaked open, revealing a pitch-black staircase. The thudding stopped instantly.
“Elena?” I whispered. My voice sounded small, hollow.
From the darkness below, a voice responded. It was Elena’s voice, but it was flat, devoid of emotion, sounding as if it were coming from a great distance.
“You weren’t supposed to check the camera, David.”
I felt a cold draft hit the back of my neck. I realized with a jolt of pure electricity that the voice hadn’t come from the bottom of the stairs. It had come from right behind me.
I started to turn, but the lights in the hallway cut out. In the sudden strobe of the neighbor’s security light through the window, I saw her. Elena was standing in the kitchen, holding the note I had just read. She wasn’t crying. She was tearing it into tiny, meticulous pieces.
“The man on the camera,” she said, her silhouette framed by the pale moonlight. “He’s already gone. And now, the ‘Goodbye’ isn’t for me.”
She stepped toward me, and for the first time, I noticed she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. She was wearing a pair of thin, surgical gloves.
“It’s for the man the police are going to find in this basement,” she whispered. “The man who ‘disappeared’ while his wife was safely across town at a recorded dinner with friends.”
My phone on the floor buzzed. A notification from the camera app: Movement detected in Backyard. I looked at Elena, then at the door, then back at the dark basement stairs. I realized then that the note wasn’t a suicide note or a breakup letter. It was a script. And I had just walked right into the final act.
