Page 20 of Override

Every time Ronan occupies himself elsewhere in the house, Maeve disappears into the same unused guest bathroom.

Six minutes. Twenty-one minutes. Eleven. Nine. She never carries her phone. Never brings a book. Never calls anyone. She simply...Goes inside.

Then comes back out. I split the monitors. Left screen. Entering. Right screen. Leaving. The difference is subtle enough most people would never notice it.

I do.

She breathes differently. Her shoulders sit lower. Her jaw unclenches. Whatever happens inside that room...It isn't dramatic.

It's relief. Something shifts coldly beneath my ribs.

I open the estate blueprint. Guest bathroom. No cameras. No audio. No motion sensors.

The only room upstairs Ronan Gallagher can't watch. I look back to the footage. Then to the blueprint. Then back again.

Once...Fine. Twice...Interesting. Seven times...Evidence.

I scrub a hand across my jaw while the chair groans beneath me. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm projecting onto a marriage I don't understand because my frame of reference consists primarily of Matt and Rachel...and several years of government-sanctioned violence.

Entirely possible. I pull up another file.

Mary Collins.

Tuesday. 9:17 a.m. Cash payment. Forty-three minutes. No records. No explanation.

I stare at both monitors. Guest bathroom. Mary Collins. Interior cameras. Changing wardrobe. None of it proves anything.

Separately...Each one has a reasonable explanation.

Together...They refuse to fit.

People don't repeatedly hide in the only unwatched room in their own house unless being watched has become exhausting.

The office suddenly feels too quiet. Rain hits the windows harder outside while another surveillance notification flashes across the corner monitor.

Gallagher system update scheduled tomorrow. My eyes narrow slowly. A thought begins forming almost immediately.

Absolutely not, I think.

The thought continues anyway. By the time I reach for my phone to call Callum, I already know—I’m going to do something profoundly stupid.

Callum answers on the second ring. “You know it’s after midnight, right?”

I keep my eyes on the surveillance feeds while typing one-handed across the keyboard. “Time is a social construct.”

“That sentence alone makes me want to fight you.”

“Noted.”

Rain continues hammering against the Grayline office windows while lines of Gallagher security code scroll steadily across the center monitor. Upstairs hallway cameras. Motion tracking. System redundancies. Access points.

The entire estate is built like a cage pretending to be a home. My jaw tightens slightly at the thought.

Callum exhales into the phone. “What happened?”

“I need to add separate surveillance on Ronan.”

Silence.