Three years after Daniel died, I had convinced myself that grief had made me suspicious of everything. His accident had never felt completely right, but the police had called it a tragic loss of control on an empty road, and the insurance company had settled almost immediately. I had accepted the explanation because accepting it was easier than imagining something worse. Yet I could still remember Daniel’s strange behavior during the weeks before his death. He checked the locks twice every night. He looked over his shoulder when we went shopping. And one evening, he took my hands and told me that if anything ever seemed wrong, I should trust my instincts and call the police first, family second. I never understood what he meant.

Then my son Lucas came home from the barbershop with a strange story. His barber, Damon, had stopped cutting his hair halfway through the appointment after noticing something unusual behind Lucas’s ear. Damon had served six years as an army medic, and instead of dismissing the flesh-colored patch as a scar or skin irritation, he examined it carefully. Then his face changed. He told Lucas not to touch it and called the police. When the detective arrived, he carefully removed the object and sealed it in an evidence bag. It was a tracker. That night, after a threatening message appeared taped to my front door, the detective looked at me and asked the question that made my stomach drop: “Did Daniel ever tell you he was afraid someone was watching your family?”