Admin Access

"Daddy's on his way."

The words crawled under my skin like insects. I slammed the casement window shut, locking out the February wind and the sickeningly tender tone of my husband's voice. I didn't cry. I turned my back on the driveway and marched straight to the one place in this house where I held absolute power. My office.

The heavy oak door clicked shut behind me. Two curved monitors glowed on my standing desk, currently displaying the tax returns for a local bakery. I minimized the spreadsheets. I was the household CFO. I managed the property taxes, the 529 plans, the utility bills, and the endless stream of digital passwords that kept our lives functioning. Julian designed buildings; I maintained the foundation. If there was a crack in it, I would find it.

I pulled up a new browser window and logged into the primary family email account. Julian used it for shared subscriptions and smart home devices, always trusting me to clear out the junk. I clicked the search bar and typed the name of the new security hub.

The inbox was empty.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, bypassing the spam folder and clicking directly into the archived trash.

There. An email from *SecureNet Hub Integration*, time-stamped last Friday at 4:12 PM. Exactly when Julian had been setting up the base station in the living room.

The email was marked as read. It had been manually archived sixty seconds after it hit the inbox. He hadn't wanted me to see the attached device list. He was compartmentalizing the data, hiding the digital footprint before I could review it.

"A neighbor's baby monitor," I whispered to the empty room.

I opened a new tab and typed in our router’s local IP address to access the admin portal. The password prompt appeared. Julian might think he was clever, but I was the one who managed the network infrastructure. I bypassed his limited user profile and logged in using the master credentials.

The dashboard loaded, displaying a web of connected devices. Two iPhones. A smart TV. My laptop. Chloe’s iPad.

And a secondary base station.

I clicked on the station’s device logs. The screen filled with lines of code and connection timestamps. According to Julian, this glitch started Friday. But the system logs told a different story. The MAC address hadn't just accidentally synced over the weekend. It had been steadily pinging our primary account, downloading firmware updates and syncing video packets, for six straight months.

Six months of a nursery camera. Six months of a baby.

My chest tightened. The air in the office suddenly felt too thin to breathe. I highlighted the external IP address transmitting the video feed. If it was a crossed wire with a neighbor, the IP would trace back to our local internet service provider's node here in the Heights. If it was a testing setup at his architectural site visit, as he'd claimed whenever he traveled, it would trace to downtown Chicago.

I copied the string of numbers, opened a standard IP geolocation tool, and pasted it into the search bar. My finger hovered over the mouse.

If I clicked it, the facade would break. The fifteen years of shared calendars and joint tax returns would burn down to ash.

I clicked.

The progress bar flashed green. A map loaded on the right monitor, dropping a red pin onto a grid of winding streets. The text populated underneath.

The IP address wasn't in Chicago where his site visit was. It was forty miles away, in the wealthy suburbs of Oak Brook.