I feel physically sick remembering that conversation now.

Over the next two weeks, Artie was always there.

He would stand by our chain-link fence, watching Keith mow the lawn.

He asked incredibly specific questions about our schedule.

“What time do you usually get up for your morning walk, Karen?” he asked me once while I was weeding the flower beds.

I thought he was just a lonely older man looking for conversation.

I told him everything. I told him when Keith had his doctor appointments, when I went to Kroger, and when we liked to sit on the back porch.

Then we hired Greg to update the old 1980s outlets.

Greg started in the master bedroom, and that’s when the nightmare began.

He found the first camera tucked inside the plastic casing of the smoke detector.

Then he found one in the living room ceiling fan.

By noon, he had pulled seven of them out of the house.

They were in the kitchen, the guest bedroom, the bathroom, and even the small laundry closet.

Every single room had an eye.

Greg asked Keith to help him crawl under the floorboards into the damp crawl space.

It smelled of wet dirt and old insulation down there.

Behind a stack of rotten firewood, they found a heavy metal receiver blinking with green lights.

“It’s still recording,” Greg said, his voice shaking when he came back up.

“This is professional gear. Someone spent a fortune on this.”

Keith’s hands were trembling so badly he couldn’t dial his phone, so I had to call the sheriff’s department myself.

Detective Miller arrived forty minutes later with a technician.

They spent hours bagging the equipment and cutting the wires.

“There are three years of footage stored on this local drive,” the detective told us, rubbing his eyes.

Three years.

But we had only lived there for twenty-one days.

“Was it Mr. Henderson?” I asked, praying the previous owner was the freak.

“We’ll check,” Miller said.

That night was absolute hell.

We couldn’t sit in our own living room without feeling dirty.

Keith went around with black duct tape, covering every vent, every mirror seam, and every corner of the ceiling.

We sat at the kitchen table in the dark.

Around nine o’clock, there was a knock at the door.

Our hearts stopped.

Keith pulled back the curtain. “It’s Artie,” he whispered.

I opened the door, trying to keep my face normal.