Someone Is Living in My Video Calls

How it begins

The man in the green coat walked behind the finance director at eleven seventeen.

At eleven forty-three, he walked behind a dentist in another city.

Nora paused the recording.

The coat was distinctive. One shoulder shone darker than the other, as though it had recently been wet. The man carried a paper bag in his left hand.

She opened the earlier file.

Same coat. Same bag. Same brief glance toward the camera.

A stock background, perhaps. People used stranger things to conceal untidy rooms.

She checked the file notes.

Both clients had requested captions from original recordings. No visual alterations. No shared production team.

Nora wrote a query and moved to the next job.

At twelve six, the man crossed the back of a charity trustee's kitchen.

This time he stopped.

He looked directly into the lens and raised one finger to his lips.

Nora took off her headphones.

Her flat was quiet except for the refrigerator. In the window above her desk, her own reflection watched her sit very still.

She saved the three timestamps in a separate document.

Then she opened the recording of yesterday's team meeting.

She had attended from this chair, with the drying rack behind her and a blue towel hanging from its nearest bar. She remembered apologizing for the laundry. Her manager had made a joke about domestic transparency.

In the recording, the rack was there.

The towel was not.

The man in the green coat stood beside it, holding the blue fabric between both hands.

Nora closed the laptop.

Across the room, the drying rack made a small clicking noise as the heating came on.

The towel hung exactly where she remembered leaving it.

She did not touch it.

Instead, she wrote the time on paper.

For the first time that morning, she trusted a mark she could keep in her hand.