My heart stopped, and I couldn’t breathe when I saw exactly what his frantic fingers pulled from the center of the root ball.
Wrapped in a small, clear plastic bag to protect it from the damp earth was a high-tech, black micro-microphone and a miniature camera lens.

Attached to it was a small piece of paper with Clara’s handwriting, facing outward so it could be read through the plastic: “He’s been watching us through the vents for months.

I found his receiver in the basement. This one was hidden in my bedroom wall. Run.”

The world around me seemed to tilt. The pieces of the puzzle slammed together in a horrifying instant. Clara hadn’t given me a plant out of affection; she had used the peace lily as a Trojan horse to smuggle the evidence of Mr. Vance’s voyeurism out of her apartment, knowing he would search her boxes before she left. And she had told me to place it directly by the window so she could see from the street if it was safely in my possession.

Mr. Vance stared at the plastic-wrapped device in his dirt-stained hand, his shoulders tense. The absolute silence in the room was deafening. Slowly, his neck stiffened, and he began to turn his head back toward me. The manic, panicked look in his bloodshot eyes had completely vanished, replaced by a cold, calculating, and predatory darkness.

He realized that I now knew his secret. He knew that I knew he had been watching me in my most private moments, tracking my movements, violating the one place I was supposed to be safe.
“You shouldn’t have kept the plant, Sarah,” he whispered, his voice dangerously low, devoid of any emotion as he slowly began to rise from the floor, blocking the path to my only exit.

Adrenaline surged through my veins like ice water. I didn’t think; I acted purely on survival instinct. I grabbed the heavy glass lamp on the side table next to the couch and threw it with all the strength I had left straight at his face.

The glass shattered against his forehead, causing him to stumble back into the wall with a sharp cry of pain, blood instantly pooling from a cut above his eye.