Chapter 25 #2
Should Jordan check their Ring cameras in Montreal, all he’ll see is a shiny black Ford F-350 with a green tree logo on each door that says tlc landscaping driving slowly up their driveway.
Should he ask Cole about it later, she’ll say that she was getting a quote from a new lawncare company.
It’s a plausible explanation; nobody who lives in the Bridle Path mows their own lawns.
Hell, half of them don’t even walk their own dogs.
A moment later, the doorbell rings. Her heart pounding wildly in her chest, she opens the front door.
The person on her doorstep looks down at Cole.
Six-one, early forties, super fit, short blond hair.
A tight black T-shirt shows off muscular arms, and one of them is holding a heavy-looking hardtop suitcase.
It’s pretty much what she expected an ex-military surveillance expert to look like, except for one small detail.
Somehow, during their back-and-forth private messaging on Third Party, Cole had managed to miss the fact that Parker is a woman. And a beautiful, badass, younger Brigitte Nielsen look-alike, at that.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Parker says, her tone serious and her face expressionless. “I’m taller than you thought.”
Despite her shock, Cole laughs. She steps aside, and she welcomes the woman inside.
* * *
There were easier options than this, of course.
The first and most obvious: hire a private investigator.
Totally legal, and Cole had found a good one through Third Party who’d followed Jordan around for a week, snapping pictures discreetly from a nondescript Toyota Corolla that nobody would ever suspect.
But with Cole doing the reality show, Jordan was always on the lookout for photographers, and he’d never purposefully be out in public behaving badly.
He’d become particularly good at spotting paparazzi, which was why Cole was surprised that Asher Kaye had actually managed to get pictures of him and Annika through that hotel room window last week.
But it turned out the pictures weren’t enough.
Her second option: nanny cams. According to someone on Third Party claiming to be a privacy lawyer, it’s perfectly fine to place cameras inside your own home.
Every room in my house has a camera in it somewhere, the lawyer had boasted to Cole via direct message when she’d asked him about it.
He’d even attached a link to his favorite “spy store.” I know everything that happens in my house.
Wife number two can’t even take a shit without me knowing about it.
Lucky lady, Cole had thought, and she had no doubt that there’d eventually be a wife number three.
She clicked the link anyway, and was taken to a site that offered an extensive selection of everyday objects like alarm clocks, smoke detectors, Wi-Fi routers, and desktop speakers, all with cameras built into them.
She knew immediately it was no bueno. Jordan’s family has lived in the Bridle Path for two generations, and when the time came to buy his own property, the first thing he did was gut the existing house to build the modern structure Cole is now living in.
Her husband’s personal aesthetic is modern and minimalist; this house feels like the MoMA with its gallery-white walls, sleek fixtures, and abstract and jarring artwork she doesn’t understand.
She could already imagine Jordan’s reaction if he came home to discover a plastic digital alarm clock on the nightstand.
Not in this house, he would say to her before removing the offending object. I’ll find you something nicer.
Jordan is very particular about his home. And make no mistake, this is his home. The prenup is clear on that. Whatever happens between them, this house—this mansion—stays with him.
Which led Cole her to her final option: install hidden cameras inside the existing fixtures. That way nothing in the house would appear any different. This would require professional installation, and this is where things got a little fuzzy.
Unlike employing nanny cams, which are hidden inside portable objects and are meant to observe people visiting your house, installing cameras without your spouse’s knowledge falls into a legally gray area, and Cole soon learned that no reputable security company would agree to do it.
Besides, an installation like this requires a specific skill set—and this, the anonymous lawyer warned her, would be expensive.
You gotta go underground for that, he told her. And it will cost you a pretty penny.
Pretty pennies she had, but neither of the names the lawyer sent her panned out.
When Cole told them she wanted cameras everywhere, she literally meant everywhere, but both of the people she contacted refused to install cameras in the bathrooms and bedrooms. Those were areas where people had a reasonable expectation of privacy, and using technology to observe someone for the purposes of viewing them naked or engaged in a sexual act was straight-up illegal.