I took Gavin's Tesla Model S into the dealership service center on Commonwealth Avenue on a cold Tuesday morning because the center console touchscreen kept rebooting every time he backed out of the driveway.
Gavin had kissed me on the cheek before leaving for his architecture firm at 7:00 AM, holding his vintage leather briefcase, smelling of expensive sandalwood cologne. 'Sweetheart, tell them to check the firmware update,' he told me with that warm, tired smile he had perfected over eight years. 'I've been working eighty-hour weeks on the city waterfront redevelopment bid. My brain is completely fried.'
I felt guilty even asking him to borrow my car that morning. Gavin was thirty-six, the lead principal at his design boutique, charismatic, fiercely driven, and for eight years, I thought we were the definition of an unbreakable power couple in Boston.
Three hours later, while I was sitting in the dealership customer lounge drinking a lukewarm cappuccino, the service manager, a tall man named Derek with grease-stained cuffs, walked over holding a small red USB thumb drive.
"Mrs. Cross?" Derek asked, pulling a clipboard from under his arm. "Good news and weird news. The screen reboot wasn't a software glitch. The internal flash memory partition was completely clogged because the vehicle's Sentry mode and auxiliary interior cabin
buffer had been manually set to continuous circular overwrite."
"I don't understand," I said, setting my coffee paper cup down on the glass table. "What does that mean?"
"It means someone plugged a secondary storage expander into the glovebox USB port and set the cameras to record in high definition every time the vehicle was parked in your residential garage," Derek explained, tapping the red drive against his clipboard. "The memory buffer filled up and started crashing the main navigation computer. I backed up the raw footage onto this thumb drive before doing a factory reset. You might want to hold onto it—there's about thirty gigabytes of video from the last three weeks."
I thanked him, paid the nominal diagnostic fee, and walked out into the crisp autumn sunlight of the parking lot.
I didn't think anything sinister of it at first. Gavin was an obsessive tech enthusiast who loved automated home gadgets, smart security cameras, and surveillance monitors. I figured he was just testing the vehicle's perimeter sensors against neighborhood delivery vans.
I got into the driver's seat, pulled my MacBook out of my work tote, and plugged the red USB drive into the side port.
A folder opened on my desktop labeled 'TESLA_CAM_ARCHIVE_OCT'. Inside were over two hundred timestamped video clips, organized neatly by
date and time.
Curious, I clicked on the clip labeled 'OCT_14_1402_GARAGE.mp4'. It was from two weeks ago, on a Tuesday at 2:02 in the afternoon—a day Gavin claimed he was in confidential city zoning meetings in Cambridge.
The video opened in crisp 1080p high definition. The front and side-repeater cameras showed our two-car garage at our home in Brookline. The automatic garage door rolled down, shutting out the afternoon sunlight. Gavin cut the engine.
For three minutes, Gavin sat in the driver's seat, checking his hair in the rearview mirror and typing on his phone. Then, the side camera captured the garage pedestrian access door opening.
A woman stepped into the garage wearing oversized tortoiseshell sunglasses, a camel hair coat, and black suede heels. She pulled off her sunglasses, smiled directly at the windshield, and walked toward the passenger side door.
My breath hitched in my throat like I had swallowed a handful of crushed glass.
The woman was Rachel Vance.
Rachel wasn't a stranger. Rachel was my co-founder and equal fifty-fifty business partner at Helios Biometric Systems—the medical data analytics startup I had spent the last seven years building from my basement into a firm currently evaluating a forty-million-dollar acquisition offer from a European healthcare conglomerate.
Rachel had been my maid of honor. She had