My hands shook as the stranger pressed a small black box into them.
“You deserve to know the truth,” he whispered before disappearing into the crowd.
Inside the box was an old memory card and a folded note written in my stepdad’s handwriting.
If you’re reading this, I’m gone. I know you hated me, and maybe you always will. But the camera was never meant to watch you.
I almost threw the note away. After everything he’d done, I didn’t want excuses from the grave. But curiosity won. That night, I borrowed a laptop and opened the files from the memory card.
There were hundreds of recordings. Not of me changing clothes or invading my privacy like I had feared. The camera pointed toward my bedroom window and door. In clip after clip, my stepdad checked on me after he thought I was asleep. Sometimes he looked terrified.
Then I found the final video.
He sat close to the camera, exhausted and pale. “Your biological father found us,” he said. “He’s dangerous. Your mom didn’t want you to know. I put the camera there because he’d been trying to get into your room.”
My stomach dropped.
At the very end of the recording, someone slowly turned my bedroom doorknob from the outside.
