Claire’s house had an ordinary security system.
Doorbell camera.
Kitchen camera aimed toward the back entrance.
One living-room camera installed after packages disappeared.
Cloud storage.
Local backup through a base unit.
Wade had administrator access.
So did Claire.
Police obtained logs.
Several clips from the week before Lucy’s fracture were missing from cloud storage.
Deleted under Wade’s account.
Not automatically criminal.
He was an authorized user.
Could be ordinary cleanup.
Then the local base unit.
Its microSD card had been removed.
When?
Unknown initially.
Claire said:
“The morning Lucy got hurt.”
She removed it.
That card was not the USB in the boot.
She had copied files from the local card onto the USB over several weeks and returned the card each time.
Why?
Because Wade sometimes deleted cloud clips after arguments.
Claire began saving copies.
Not because she had decided to prosecute him.
At first because she wanted proof for herself.
That sentence mattered.
“He would say something had not happened,” she told her lawyer. “Then I would question whether I remembered it correctly.”
Gaslighting was an overused word online.
Here, the behavior was specific.
Wade denied yelling.
Denied blocking doors.
Denied breaking a lamp.
Denied taking her phone one night.
The camera captured some events.
Claire saved them.
She did not show me.
Why?
Because Wade’s worst anger often followed any mention of me.
I had become useful to him as a threat.
“Run to Daniel.”
“Tell Daniel.”
“Let Daniel decide everything.”
Claire knew calling me could escalate him.
So she called no one.
At least not until the final week.
