My husband always forbade me from getting close to the air conditioner, but one day it broke while he was on a business trip. I had to call a technician. He opened the casing, looked inside — and said in fear: “Take the children and get out of this house immediately…”
My husband often disappeared on business trips. He would leave for weeks, sometimes without even warning me in advance. In the apartment, there was a heavy, suffocating silence, and only his strict prohibitions constantly echoed in my head. One of them was never to call repairmen, especially for the air conditioner, and never to try fixing anything myself. To any of my questions, he always gave the same answer: “Don’t touch it. I’ll fix it myself.”
When Viktor left again, the silver SUV disappeared around the corner, and for the first time I felt relief.
But suddenly the air conditioner screeched, slammed, and finally broke down. For the fifth time this week. My husband constantly fixed it, and the air conditioner kept breaking again and again.
The room suddenly became hot. The children were lying on the floor—weak, sleepy, their faces flushed.
I called Viktor. He didn’t pick up right away. In the background I could hear voices, a woman’s laughter… and a child’s.
— The air conditioner broke again, I’m calling a technician, you can’t fix it anyway — I said.
— Don’t you dare! — he shouted sharply. — No repairmen. No people in the house. I said so!
The call ended abruptly, as if he had deliberately turned off the phone.
I stood there for a minute, then still opened an app and called a technician. An hour later, a man with a toolbox rang the doorbell.
He inspected the unit, set up a stepladder, climbed up, and carefully removed the air conditioner cover.
And then his expression changed. His gaze became hard and tense, as if he had seen something he was not supposed to see.
— Ma’am, has someone repaired this air conditioner before?
— Yes, my husband. More than once. It breaks almost every day.
— Where are your children? — he asked quietly but sharply.
— In the kitchen… Is something wrong?
He took a respirator out of his toolbox, put it on as if preparing for dangerous work, and only then looked at me again. There was panic in his eyes.
— Take the children and get out of this house right now. Immediately. Quickly…
I felt my breath catch.
— What did you find there?
He removed a flat device from the top of the air conditioner, covered in dust. At first I thought it was a filter. But inside I could see tiny diodes. A small lens. Soldering. An antenna.
— This is not part of the air conditioner, — he said. — It’s a camera. A good one. It records around the clock and sends data to a remote storage device.
I felt my hands go cold.
— Are you saying… we were being watched?
— For a long time, — the technician replied. — And professionally.
I stood there, unable to breathe. My mind was spinning with fragments of thought: his long “business trips,” sudden bursts of jealousy, strange questions about who came to see me during the day. And the fact that he forbade touching the air conditioner, as if it were something sacred.
The technician placed the camera into a bag.
— You need to decide what to do next. But leaving this in the apartment without attention is definitely not an option.
After he left, I sat in the kitchen for a long time, holding the children close.
Only then did I finally understand that his “business trips” were just a cover. He lived with another woman, cheated, and at the same time watched me. He suspected me of doing what he himself was doing.
