I used to believe control was love. That if I could see everything, measure everything, anticipate every failure, I could protect what remained of my life. That belief hardened inside me the day my wife died. Seraphina’s death didn’t arrive like a storm; it came like silence. One moment the room was full of breath and music and plans, and the next it was sterile, quiet, unfinished. She had survived the pregnancy, survived the delivery, survived the applause and flowers and congratulations.

Then, four days later, her heart simply stopped. That was the phrase the doctors used—simply stopped—as if a heart could do anything simply. I signed papers without reading them. I nodded at condolences I didn’t hear. I carried my twin sons out of the hospital like fragile artifacts instead of living beings. My house—once glassy and warm with sound—became an echo chamber where grief amplified itself. I didn’t know how to hold two infants and my own devastation at the same time. One of the twins cried constantly. The other slept like nothing could reach him.

I started to think of them not as children but as variables: problems to manage, systems to stabilize. I hired help the way I acquired companies—efficiently, distantly, without emotional investment. And when my sister-in-law began whispering doubts, when she suggested that my vulnerability made me incapable of protecting what mattered, I listened. Because grief makes you suspicious of everything except your own fear. That’s when I installed the cameras. Twenty-six of them. Behind vents, inside fixtures, embedded in architecture so discreetly even I forgot where some were. I told myself it was about safety. About oversight. About responsibility. But the truth was uglier. I wanted proof. Proof that the nanny was lazy.