You Were Always Mine (He's Been Watching #4)

1. Rye

RYE

The live feeds are six windows on a single screen.

Her kitchen. Her living room. The hallway outside the bedroom door. The bedroom—smoke detector angle, slightly left of center, best coverage I could manage without installing two. Her building’s lobby. The lot where she parks.

Eight years, three months, eleven days.

That’s how long I’ve been watching Aster Wells.

I’m not delusional about what that number sounds like.

I have a company to run, twenty-three employees, government contracts that need me sharp during business hours.

I’m not a man who lets the wanting bleed into the work.

I’m a man who builds systems to contain it—the server room in my sub-basement, the encrypted drives, the notification app wired to her building’s door sensors.

Forty-two square feet, climate-controlled, biometric lock.

Three terabytes of footage sorted by date, cross-referenced by activity, tagged for the segments I return to. I know what the tags reveal. I made peace with myself four years in and I haven’t revisited the question since.

Eight years ago I installed the cameras while Connor was in Denver and Aster was in Portland visiting her sister.

Sixty-three hours of access. I told the building manager I was doing a security audit—and I was.

I found every vulnerability in that building.

Replaced the front door deadbolt. Reinforced the bedroom window lock.

Fixed a failing strike plate that would have buckled at a decent kick.

I left that apartment more secure than I found it.

Then I installed four cameras and left.

The living room catches the couch, the kitchen table, the TV wall.

The kitchen covers the stove and counter and sink.

The hallway is narrow; one lens handles it end to end.

The bedroom was the hardest decision I’ve made.

I held the smoke detector in both hands for close to two hours before I mounted it.

Not guilt—guilt was never any use to me.

What stopped me was the weight of what having that access would mean.

Standing in the server room at midnight watching her sleep with nowhere to put what I felt.

I mounted it anyway.

I’ve watched her sleep more nights than I want to assign a number to. Her hair spread across the left pillow. The right side of the bed untouched.

Connor stopped sleeping on that side three years before the marriage ended.

I watched the withdrawal happen, night by night—the incremental turning-away, a man growing incurious about the most remarkable thing in his life.

I documented it in the folder I’d been building.

Thirty-seven items. I told myself it was leverage. Insurance.

The truth was simpler and darker and I had no patience for examining it closely: I was building the case for an action I hadn’t yet admitted I was going to take.

Fourteen months ago, I took it. Opened the folder. Selected four—the most recent, the ones with external timestamps she could verify without needing to know there were thirty-three others. She didn’t need the full picture. She needed enough.

She filed six weeks later.

I was in Singapore. I watched through the live feed—she sat at the kitchen table with the divorce papers and a cup of coffee she didn’t drink, and she signed her name four times with her hand perfectly steady. No hesitation. No tears. Connor wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t.

She set the pen down, sat still for seven minutes, then picked up the phone.

I have four years of kitchen audio. She said: It’s done. I feel nothing yet. Is that normal?

Her sister said yes.

I had a board meeting in forty minutes. The rest of my life had just started on a three-inch screen and I sat in a glass tower in Singapore and said nothing at all.

I gave her three months.

I know how she reconstructs. She’s careful—new routines layered in slowly, one careful addition at a time, the way you’d handle something fragile, one careful piece at a time, when you can’t afford it to break.

The plants came back to the kitchen window in April, three weeks after the filing.

The Sunday dinners returned in May—the elaborate ones she’d stopped making in year six of the marriage, first for herself, then for her sister, then for friends whose voices I tracked through the intercom audio.

I watched her rebuild herself through the spring and I didn’t contact her, didn’t insert myself, didn’t do anything except watch and wait and burn.

I was in her apartment once during those three months.

Not for the cameras—they didn’t need maintenance. I went in on a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks after the divorce finalized, while she was at her sister’s. I let myself in with the key I’d had cut four years ago from a copy Connor left on the counter one morning and never noticed was gone.

I didn’t take anything. I’m not that man.

What I did was stand in the kitchen she’d been rebuilding her life in and breathe the air that was hers.

I put my hand on the back of the chair at the kitchen table—the left side, her side, the one I’d watched her sit in on the night she said I’ve been disappearing.

The wood was cool. I held it for a long time.

I left without touching anything else. Locked the door behind me. Sat in my car for forty-five minutes before I could drive.

That’s the shape of eight years of wanting something you’re not supposed to have.

During the three months I built the profile.

“Daniel” is everything I am without the history getting in the way.

I pulled from years of reference: the books she returns to—broken spines, dog-eared pages I’ve watched her turn on the living room camera.

The opinions she stopped voicing to Connor because he found them inconvenient.

The films she watches alone on rainy Sundays.

The late-night music after 11 PM when the apartment belongs entirely to her.

Her sense of humor—dry, precise, the kind she only uses when she’s fully comfortable with someone.

Her curiosity. Three years of dinner conversation she’d been running in her head without anyone to direct it at.

I was describing myself. The self that had lived in the server room for eight years and never once stood in a room she was standing in.

She matched in forty-eight hours.

Six weeks. Every message saved and backed up twice. Every voice note she started sending in week three when text stopped feeling like enough—I listened to those sixty, seventy times each.

Her voice at 11 PM from the kitchen table I knew by heart, saying things to a stranger she’d never said to anyone.

The early weeks: her sense of humor coming online slowly, testing.

Then her actual opinions, the ones Connor found inconvenient, arriving one at a time like she was confirming they were safe.

Then her questions—real ones, the kind you only ask when you’ve stopped performing and started actually talking.

I answered them the way I would have answered them in person.

The way I would have answered them for eight years if I’d been in the right room.

Week four the conversation went somewhere honest.

A man who already knows what I need, she wrote at 11:47 on a Thursday. Who doesn’t have to ask. Who just takes it. Not violent. Just sure. Like my yes is already known information.

She sent it and went quiet for twenty minutes. Then: Is that terrible?

I wrote: No. That’s honest.

She said: I’ve never told anyone that.

I know.

I’ve been in her apartment more times than I’ve been to my own sister’s house.

I know her shampoo changed two years ago—a different bottle shape in the hallway angle when the bathroom door was open.

I know the 3 AM insomnia pattern she manages with chamomile and bad television.

I know what she looks like carrying something she hasn’t told anyone—the held tension, the stillness that isn’t peace.

I know the left side of the bed is hers and has been hers alone for three years.

I have every one of those nights on the server.

I know how she looks in her sleep. The low exhale she makes in the middle of a dream.

The exact moment the tension goes out of her body after she closes her eyes—the shoulders first, then her hands, then the slow settling of her face into something unguarded.

I’ve watched that moment more nights than I’ll ever say.

Every single time my chest does the same thing it’s been doing for eight years: a compression, a want so deep and so long-sustained it has its own weight, its own gravitational pull.

I took myself apart to her voice note three nights running.

Server room, lights off. Her voice on the left monitor—sure, like my yes is already known information—the live feed on the right. My cock in my fist. Her voice in the room. The parking lot I’d already scouted in my head.

The first night I stayed on that: the fantasy she’d described, the weight of the word sure, her careful honesty, finally saying the true thing to someone she thought was a stranger.

I came with eight years of knowing her body through peripheral footage—the shape of her in the hallway angle, the warmth she radiates in the kitchen camera at 7 AM, the way she moves through her own apartment when she thinks no one is watching.

The footage doesn’t have temperature. My imagination has had all that time to supply it.

What her pussy looks like when she’s wet.

How she sounds. I have the hallway audio from two winters ago—door left ajar, the bathroom—and I’ve worn that file out.

The second night I ran the June laugh on the other monitor while I worked—the living room camera, her on the couch, head thrown back, the sound I’ve watched a hundred and twelve times. I came to her laugh. I’ve made peace with what that says about me.

The third night I played the full voice note from the beginning—not just the fantasy, all of it: the building to it, the twenty-minute silence before she asked if it was terrible, the relief in her voice when I wrote back that it wasn’t.

I listened to all of it and thought about everything I know that she doesn’t know I know: the chamomile at 3 AM, the way her voice goes flat when she’s carrying something difficult, the exhale she makes in her sleep that isn’t quite a word.

I thought about the parking lot. The car. The word sure. I came with her voice in my ear—I’ve never told anyone that—and eight years of restraint collapsing into a single point.

Nothing else has worked. Not in eight years—just her, just this, just the footage and the audio and now the voice notes she sent to a name that was always mine.

There is no Daniel. There never was.

Tonight she finds that out.

The restaurant is eight blocks from her apartment.

I chose it for the lot—low-lit, mostly empty after 7, no foot traffic at the hour that matters.

I’ve run the scenario until it’s clean: she walks in, sees me, and I can predict the sequence across her face.

Confusion first. Then the recalibration, the mental reaching for another explanation.

Then the recognition, the one that lands in the body before the mind catches up.

She’ll stand. Reach for her bag. Move toward the door on the left—the one closest to her chair, the one that angles toward the parking lot.

I know her. I know the tight jaw when she’s solving for exit. I know the quick peripheral sweep she does without realizing she does it. I know every version of her face and I know what I need to leave this situation right now looks like on her.

I also know she wrote the parking lot fantasy herself. She sent it at 11:47 PM to a man she’d never met.

She sent it to me.

My cock has been hard since I walked into this restaurant.

Forty-seven minutes. The scotch isn’t doing anything about it—nothing is going to do anything about it except the next hour.

Eight years compressed into one parking lot.

The patience I’ve held for eight years is about to go, and I can feel it in my hands—the effort of holding myself still by sheer will.

My phone buzzes. Door alert. She just walked into the restaurant.

I don’t look up immediately. I give her the room to cross it, to stop at the table, to have the full experience of the moment before I alter it.

I know her footsteps—the cadence of her stride—and tonight they’re slightly faster, the nervousness of a first meeting compressing the rhythm by a fraction of a second.

I let her stop. The pause lands—the held breath of it, the instant she reads the table number against the face she wasn’t expecting.

“Rye.”

I look up.

Eight years of cameras and I still wasn’t prepared.

No screen. No lens. No remove. Just Aster, standing at table twelve, dark eyes running the math.

She’s in the navy dress—the one I know from the bedroom-angle footage, the one she wears when she wants to feel like herself.

She wore it to her sister’s birthday in June. I have that night on the server.

She’s more than the footage. She was always going to be.

She doesn’t know about the parking lot yet.

She doesn’t know about the eight years.

She doesn’t know that every single thing she told “Daniel” is mine now—stored in the same server that holds three terabytes of her life, in the same room where I’ve spent more nights than I can count watching her sleep.

She’s about to. All of it. Starting with the phone in my hand and the first message already on the screen.

Tonight the patience is over. It ends the moment she understands what she’s looking at.

I let her see my face. I stop hiding any of it.