Chapter 4: The Cloud Backup
The rain hammered against the windshield of my sedan as I pulled into the empty driveway of our suburban home. It was late afternoon, and Ryan should have been at his corporate office downtown for another two hours. According to Sarah Vance, legally I had every right to retrieve essential personal belongings and necessary documents for the children, provided I didn't breach the peace. But my real objective wasn't clothes or birth certificates; it was the digital heart of that security camera system.
I unlocked the front door and stepped into the quiet house. The air smelled of lemon polish and the lingering scent of Helen’s lavender perfume. The kitchen was spotless—too spotless. The spilled milk was gone, and the leather belt had vanished from the counter where I had dropped it. I hurried to the hallway closet where the main router and network-video recorder box were stored on a high shelf. My heart pounded against my ribs like a trapped bird as I reached up, pulled down the heavy metal box, and examined the ports.
The physical hard drive inside was locked with a proprietary master password that only Ryan knew. Despair threatened to swallow me whole. If I couldn't access the local drive, the footage of Helen holding the belt over Lily was trapped behind a digital wall. Then I remembered the installation manual I had glanced at when Ryan first set up the system a year ago. It had a cloud redundancy feature—an automatic off-site backup linked to a secondary master account that Ryan had never bothered to disable.
My hands shook as I pulled out my smartphone and opened the brand's companion app, tapping through the forgotten setup steps. I entered my own email address—the one Ryan had used as a secondary recovery contact when configuring the app during our anniversary trip two years prior. A prompt flashed on my screen: Reset master password via email verification?
"Yes," I breathed, tapping the screen frantically.
Within seconds, a notification pinged. A temporary override code appeared in my inbox. I entered it, bypassed the local lock, and the interface opened, loading a chronological list of video clips stored safely in the remote cloud server. My breath caught in my throat as I scrolled back to yesterday afternoon. There, timestamped at 4:14 PM, was a high-definition file labeled Kitchen_Cam_01.
May you like
I didn't watch it right there in the quiet house, terrified that Ryan might walk through the door early. Instead, I hit download, watched the progress bar crawl to one hundred percent, and then forwarded the encrypted file directly to Sarah Vance’s secure legal server.
As the transfer completed, the front door clicked open. Heavy footsteps echoed in the foyer. Ryan stood in the doorway, his briefcase in hand, freezing when he saw me standing by the hall closet with the network box in my hands.
