My Husband Installed a Tracking App on My Phone at 3am, I Pretended to Be Asleep

Part One

The security alert vibrated against my palm like a secret too impatient to wait for morning. SecureTrack: location data accessed. That was the exact wording—clinical, precise, like the voice of a lab technician telling you the numbers are “outside the expected range.”

I wasn’t quite awake. I was just far enough above sleep to know I hadn’t installed anything called SecureTrack and to feel the precise shift in my life: before I knew, after I knew. The blue wash from my phone threw strange angles across our bedroom; Eric was turned away from me, a slope of shoulder and dark hair rising and falling in the metronome of untroubled sleep. Late, lately—late to bed, late to the truth, late to so many things I no longer wanted to catalogue.

It wasn’t on my home screen. It wasn’t in the obvious list of apps. But buried three menus deep—behind accessibility permissions and “special access”—there it was: SecureTrack running “quietly in the background,” an euphemism for we weren’t supposed to find this. I tapped into a map. Red dots traced my week: the loop to the high school where I teach, Thursday’s coffee with Sarah, even the detour to the jewelry store where I’d tried on a bracelet I couldn’t afford and pictured Eric unwrapping it on our anniversary.

Heat rose up my spine. The bedroom tilted. I slipped out of bed and down the hall, past the dim rectangle of Zoe’s room—the click of her fan, her breathing low and even—into the kitchen where the under-cabinet lights made everything look like evidence.

More than location. Texts. Call logs. Browser history. A folder labeled Recordings—a neat row of time-stamped files. I tapped one. My own voice spilled tinny into the quiet: “I don’t know, Sarah. He’s… different. Always on his phone.”

Footsteps above made my lungs forget how. A trip to the bathroom. The flush. The sink. Familiar sounds turned barbed. I closed the app. I deleted the notifications. Teacher instincts filed the rest: don’t show your hand too early; gather facts; make a plan.

Back in bed I pretended to sleep, eyes closed, breath measured. My phone buzzed one more time. A number I didn’t recognize.

Be careful what you look for, Riley. Some truths are better left buried.

I lay awake until the light at the edge of the blinds turned from slate to nickel to the cheap gold of morning. I made coffee by rote, packed Zoe’s lunch by muscle memory. Eric came down in his blue suit—the one that said he intended to win something—and poured the first travel mug like he hadn’t been caught turning our marriage into a case study. “Big meeting?” I asked, all teacher-in-the-hallway calm.

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably won’t be home for dinner.”

“The Morrison account?” I kept my voice so casual it felt like a costume.

He didn’t look up from the swirl of coffee and sugar. “Needs extra attention.”

Zoe padded in with wet hair and a backpack full of coding projects. “Dad, you promised to help me with my privacy assignment this weekend,” she said. “Remember? The one where we build a tracker and then harden a device against it?”

I almost dropped the knife. Eric’s shoulders tightened. “Something came up,” he said, kissing the air near her head. “Next weekend.”

After he left, Zoe watched me wash the same plate for the third time. “Mom,” she said gently, “you didn’t sleep.”

“Finals,” I said. “Papers. You know.”

She slid a look at me that said: I am fourteen, not four. Her eyes cut to the phone in my hand just as another SecureTrack alert flashed—audio recorded, kitchen, 7:15 a.m. I snapped the screen dark and smiled the way I used to when she was a toddler and swallowed a penny.

“I have an early meeting,” I lied, grabbing my bag. “You okay on the bus?”

“Sure,” she said, but her face had already closed against the lie.

In the school parking lot I sat with my hands on the wheel and my stomach dividing itself into before and after. I scrolled to Sarah’s number. She’d know. Sarah works in IT security; she could tell me whether I was holding spyware or a marital metaphor. Before I could tap call, another text flashed—same unknown number.

Careful who you trust, Riley. Sarah might not be the friend you think she is.

The hair went up on my arms. My phone’s camera isn’t special; it’s a lens and a self-consciousness machine. The feeling of being watched sank into my spine. A tap on the glass made me jump; it was only Dennis from English, mouthing you okay? through the closed window. I nodded and lied again.

By lunch I had a private investigator’s address scrawled on a sticky note I’d taped inside a book of sonnets to make myself laugh. You go to see a man about a horse; you go to see a man about your husband.

Marcus Lee’s office sat between a laundromat and a Chinese takeout, the air in his waiting room a blend of detergent and pepper. He looked like he should have a dog at his feet and a habit of saying kid to people who were older than him. He listened to my summary without interrupting, then leaned in to study the screenshots I’d taken—always take screenshots—and nodded once. “SecureTrack Pro,” he said. “Not the kind of thing you download by accident. Requires physical access to install. Whoever did this had your phone in their hand long enough to press ‘yes’ twelve times.”

“Can you trace it?” My voice sounded like someone else’s—rug-burned, sarcastic.

“Already did.” He turned his monitor so I could see. “Purchased six weeks ago through a shell company. Billing address? Your home.”

Bile slicked my throat. “Eric.”

“And this…” He clicked through to a photo that had been taken casually from across a street, like a friend caught a moment. Eric in shirtsleeves exiting a building in Oakwood Heights, his palm on the lower back of a woman I didn’t know. She was younger than me, pretty in a way that made my eyes find every line in my own face.

“Vanessa Reed,” Marcus said. “Junior partner at your husband’s firm. Fast-tracked.”

My phone buzzed again. Having fun with Marcus? Wonder what Eric thinks about his wife meeting strange men. Marcus peered at the screen. “They’re probably using your camera,” he said. He handed me a cheap burner phone with a number scribbled on the back. “From now on, this.”

I walked to my car with the burner heavy in my hand and my phone—my phone—feeling like a leash. Eric called. “Can you grab Zoe? Late meeting.”

“Sure,” I said. “I have one, too. With the Morrison account.”

Silence made a sound. “The Morrison account,” he said. “Right.”

“Closed six months ago, Eric,” I said. “Enjoy your meeting. Say hi to Vanessa.”

I ended the call before he could recast the scene. In my windshield, my face looked unfamiliar—paler, yes, but also narrowed, sharper. Two could play this game. If they wanted to watch me, let them.

 

I didn’t make it to Vanessa’s that afternoon. I made it to a different office with harder chairs and a principal who does not enjoy surprise.

“Concerns about your emotional stability,” Principal Warner said, not looking up from the letter he had printed on school stationery. Eric sat beside him with his courtroom concern face on, the one he uses to savage a witness while sounding like he’s apologizing for the weather. “Inappropriate contact with a private investigator during school hours,” Warner added although he had no idea what he was saying.

“I’m concerned about you,” Eric said, turning his tenderness on like a faucet. “The paranoid accusations. The secret meetings.”

I let the water hit me and roll off. “I have documentation,” I said to Warner. “Of the spyware your citizen-advisory board’s favorite alumnus installed on my phone. Of it recording conversations with students and parents without consent. Of the shell company the bill ran through, using my home address.” I waited. Teachers learn silence is a tool, not a void. “I’ll email the evidence. For now, I need to talk to my daughter.”

Eric’s face cracked at that. “Zoe found—”

“Your emails?” I said. “To Vanessa? About leaving us? Yes. She found them when she was organizing your files, because that’s what daughters do when their fathers tell them they’re busy.”

 

I left him in the doorway learning how a man looks when he can’t control the next ten minutes. Back in my classroom, Zoe sat with her laptop open, the glow painting the fierce set of her mouth. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Fighting back,” she said. “Did you know most spyware carries its own backdoor? Dad should have done more research before installing it.”

“You’re not—”

“Hacking?” she said. “I’m ethical-hacking. And yes.” She pointed at a block of code. “Mom, this isn’t just an app. It’s a network.”

Marcus called. “Vanessa isn’t who she says she is,” he said. “Not exactly.”

Before I could ask, my phone buzzed with a text from Vanessa herself. We need to talk. Your husband isn’t the only one being blackmailed. Riverside Park. Thirty minutes.

 

“It’s a trap,” Marcus said. “She could be part of the setup.”

“She might be,” I said. “She might also be scared.”

Zoe didn’t look up from her screen. “There are seventeen endpoints,” she said. “All routing through law firms. All using the same spyware package. All working divorce cases. And—” she stopped, swallowed—“the money the shell companies are washing comes from… from client funds. Mom. Dad used my college account as a pass-through.”

The world tilted again, but I refused to grab for anything to steady myself. “We’re ending this,” I said. “Tonight. Not with a call to the police, not yet. If we get this wrong, someone could get hurt. Vanessa’s sister,” I said, remembering the photo Zoe had pulled from the network—a woman leaving the shelter where I volunteer, looking over her shoulder. “The other families.”

Marcus texted: FBI on route if you want them. Watch your back.

 

“Get into their system,” I told Zoe. “Quietly. Give me ten minutes of space. Then tear the whole thing down.”

“You’re not going alone,” she said.

“You’re staying here,” I said.

She didn’t argue. She just started typing faster, the little tendons in her forearms tense with effort. My daughter, the warrior I had not noticed I was raising.

Riverside Park was mostly shadow and river breath and the faint laughter of college kids a mile downstream. Vanessa looked smaller than she did in Marcus’s photos; my anger had made her sleek and dangerous in my head. The woman on the bench was simply human—tired, scared, moving in small ways because bigger ones felt impossible.

“They’re watching,” she said without looking at me. “But your daughter’s code worked. Ten-minute blind spot.”

“What deal?” I asked, keeping my voice level and my back to a lamp post.

“The firm’s been doing this for years,” she said, fingers shaking around a USB drive. “They install spyware on their own clients to get leverage on both parties. They manipulate settlements. They launder money through shell companies. Eric’s… he’s up for partner. They wanted proof he was willing to do whatever it took.”

“He used our daughter’s fund,” I said. “That wasn’t for the firm. That was his choice.”

She flinched. “They’re blackmailing me with my sister,” she said. “She’s been hiding from an abusive ex for months. I’ve been helping her. They found a way to track her through me.”

 

My phone buzzed. Zoe: Dad’s not at the office. Be careful. The message cut off. In the space it left, a voice I used to trust said my name.

“I really wished you’d stayed out of this, Riley,” Eric said, stepping out of the dark like a cautionary tale. Two men flanked him. They smelled like expensive wool and legal protection. “You weren’t supposed to find the app.” He glanced at Vanessa. “She got sloppy.”

“You got sloppy with our daughter’s future,” I said.

“It’s called protecting our future,” he said, smile turned to pitch. “The firm’s offering me partner. All I have to do is prove I understand how the game works. But we can end this. Now. Quietly. Clean divorce. Full custody. A comfortable settlement. You say yes, you walk away.”

My phone buzzed. Marcus: FBI one minute out. Stall.

“And if I don’t?” I asked.

He lifted a phone. The screen showed the shelter’s lobby—grainy feed, young women moving like fish wary of a net. “There’s a lot that can happen in a city at night,” he said. “Also: Zoe’s bright. Would be a shame if she made a mistake and ended up clicking the wrong thing on the wrong server.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said. “She’s your daughter.”

“I’m teaching her how the world works,” he said mildly.

“You’re teaching her who you are,” I said. “And you’re right about one thing: This ends tonight.”

 

I turned my screen. The live stream wasn’t fancy. It didn’t need to be. Eric’s confession had already gone out to Marcus, to a secure server, to three places I hadn’t even told myself about, in case one or two failed. Headlights arced across the path; agents in jackets blinked yellow and blue into the trees. Eric’s men melted like sugar in rain. Eric stood alone, and in that moment, he looked exactly like what he was.

“Riley,” he said, and a word that once meant home sounded like someone else’s.

“No,” I said, as the FBI’s hands took his wrists. “Not anymore.”

He called after me as they walked him toward the car. “This isn’t over.”

“No,” I said quietly, watching Vanessa sag with relief as an agent assured her her sister was safe. “It’s not.”

The firm would try to protect itself. My job might hang by a thread. Our savings were likely already ash. Somewhere in a PI’s office, my daughter was patching together a digital world in which truth might still matter.

My phone buzzed one last time. Zoe: You okay?

No. Not yet. But for the first time in a month, I knew exactly what I was fighting for.

 

 

Part Two

The holding room at the federal building had beige walls and fluorescent lights that hummed like an accusation. Eric sat across from me in the suit he’d chosen to look bulletproof. Without the aura—the office, the haircut, the deference—he looked smaller. Not defeated. Shrunk.

“You could have taken the deal,” he said softly. “We could have kept our family intact.”

“Our family,” I said, setting the USB Vanessa had given me on the table between us like a coin in a fairy tale. “You had a definition. I have one. They don’t match.”

Printouts fanned from my folder: bank statements; emails with subject lines that looked innocuous until you read the body; the list of twenty-three families the firm had used like lint traps in their dryers of money. He didn’t touch anything. He just stared at me like I’d become an object he hadn’t studied before. A woman who didn’t back down.

“You don’t understand how things work,” he said.

“I understand perfectly.” I gestured toward the door where federal agents came and went, where, through the window, I could see Vanessa talking to a woman with a badge and a notebook, her fear now organized into sentences. “Your firm only ever worked because people like me didn’t look. Or didn’t believe our eyes.”

 

A knock at the door. Zoe stood there with Marcus behind her. She had her laptop cradled like a violin. “I want to talk to him,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Eric stood a fraction. “Sweetheart—”

She flinched as if the word felt like a stranger’s hand. “Your app didn’t just record,” she said, sitting beside me and opening the computer. “It fabricated. It created fake conversations to use as leverage. Against clients. Against their spouses. Against Mom.” She clicked. File names sprang up—time stamps that matched hours I’d slept, audio of me saying things I hadn’t said, photos with pixels that had been rearranged.

“Insurance,” Eric said, too fast.

“Not insurance,” Zoe said. “Arson.”

I felt the heat then, the brainstem kind, old and clean. “You were going to destroy my career,” I said. “Take Zoe. Stand in a courtroom and tell a judge I was unfit to teach and unfit to parent.”

 

“The firm requires leverage,” he said dully, and I watched his entire self-image tilt toward a different story: I had no choice.

“You had choices every day,” Zoe said. She closed the laptop. “And every day you chose you.”

The hallway outside filled with heavier footsteps. Men in suits went by in handcuffs: partners I’d seen at firm barbecues; men whose wives had asked me about the school play; men whose kids had eaten orange slices at my kitchen table while Zoe explained recursion. The house of cards didn’t just fall; it avalanched.

Eric stood so fast his chair hiccuped backward. “Riley—”

“Don’t,” I said. “You were right in the park. It isn’t over. The firm will try to make this my fault. They will hire men who are better at bending the air than you are. They will write op-eds. They will call this a witch hunt. They will say ‘hysteria.’ They will say ‘vindictive.’ I am neither. I am finished.”

“What happens now?” he asked, and for a second he looked like the boy in the one photo his mother keeps on the mantle, the one I used to love for the hope in it.

“Now we rebuild,” I said. I took Zoe’s hand. “Without you.”

 

Six months later, our new apartment had the kind of light that forgave small sins. It also had thin walls, a faulty radiator, and a view of a brick alley I pretended was a courtyard. Home has very little to do with square footage. It has to do with the sound of your child typing in the next room, building something you can’t see yet but believe in.

“Accepted!” Zoe yelled, barrelling into the living room. “The cybersecurity workshop said yes!”

I looked at the email and then at her grin and thought of the night she sat in Marcus’s office breaking open an empire with her bare hands. “You earned that,” I said. “All of it.”

The trial was still ongoing. Eric pled to reduced charges in exchange for testifying against the partners above him. The scandal unraveled across my news feed like a tapestry being unmade: firms here, firms there, a pattern of control and money and the word family used as a shield. The school board had emailed in May, asking when I wanted to return. I’d taken my time. The thing about teaching is the kids deserve a whole person in front of them, not a bruise trying to act like a plan.

Vanessa texted: Coffee tomorrow? Sarah’s coming. Need your help with the shelter’s new security protocols. The arc of that relationship would have made no sense to me a year ago. Now it felt like the only way forward: use what hurt us to keep someone else from being hurt.

Sarah arrived early with a bag of takeout and three different kinds of highlighters. “Warrior women,” she said, dropping her keys in the dish we’d labeled NEVER AGAIN. “Ready to change the world?”

“We’re starting with the school district,” I said, opening my laptop. “Digital privacy curriculum. Lesson plans that don’t read like legal disclaimers.”

“Marcus got you the green light,” Zoe said. “You start next semester.”

I blinked. Marcus had mentioned an idea. I hadn’t realized it had sprouted legs. “We’re calling it Truth & Tools,” I said. “Teach the technology, and the ethics that have to run alongside it.”

 

Sarah lifted a container lid and let the aroma of pesto loose in our small kitchen. “Look at you,” she said. “Teacher turned reformer.”

“Revenge turned restoration,” I said.

“Revenge,” Zoe said, popping a ravioli in her mouth, “is a blunt instrument. We’re more scalpel people.”

An unknown number buzzed my screen. You thought you won. Power protects itself. I showed it to Zoe; she was already typing. “Ex-partner,” she said, fingers flying. “Angry. Forwarding to Marcus.” She did and then closed the lid of her laptop. “Some people never learn that actual power is sharing the flashlight, not hiding the map.”

We ate at the table that had been three different tables before this one—the same slapped together plank held up by new legs. Zoe and Sarah lined up code snippets next to bullet points that boiled human decency into actionable verbs. I sketched the shape of a class: You own your device. You don’t owe anyone your data. Curiosity is not consent.

After dinner, I logged in to my virtual office hours, the faces of seniors popping up in small squares like a mosaic of hope and distraction. “Professor Thompson,” one of them said, “how do you write about betrayal without sounding bitter?”

“By telling the truth about it,” I said. “Bitter is a flavor. Truth is a muscle. You build one. You survive the other.”

 

Later, when the dishes were done and Sarah’s laughter had faded down the hall, I stood in the narrow rectangle of our “balcony” and looked into the brick alley. Distant sirens wound their way toward someone else’s catastrophe. In the window across from me a man watered a fern with a gentleness that made me feel better about our species.

Zoe joined me with a blanket draped over her shoulders. “Dad’s sentencing is next week,” she said. She stated it like a fact she had decided not to feel until she was alone.

“We don’t owe that day anything,” I said. “If you want to go, we go. If you want to send a letter, we send it. If you want to watch a dumb movie and eat terrible popcorn, we do that.”

She leaned her head on my shoulder. “I wrote him a letter,” she said. “The first draft said why wasn’t Mom enough? The second draft said you taught me exactly who not to be. I deleted both.”

“What did you write?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I decided my silence is a full sentence.”

A week later, in a courtroom that smelled like varnish and the past, Eric stood up and tried to say something that might have changed everything if it had been said a year earlier. We listened because we were polite. Then we left. We didn’t stay for the part where the judge read numbers. Numbers matter. Not all of them need to live in your ears.

Outside, the sun hit our faces so hard we both laughed. “What now?” Zoe asked, and then made a face. “I know. Rebuild. Restore. Resist. All the R words.”

“Remember,” I said. “That one’s important, too.”

 

We got ice cream from the truck we used to avoid because it plays the same song on loop until your brain leaks out. It tasted exactly like ten years old and the one moment in a block party when everyone is still pretending they’re happy. We ate it on the curb because sometimes ritual is the only thing that makes time move properly.

Fall crept in. The first day of Truth & Tools I wore a blazer I bought when I thought tenure would be the end of invention and talked to a room full of juniors about the difference between privacy and secrecy. “Privacy is you closing the bathroom door,” I said. “Secrecy is someone locking it from the outside.” We wrote definitions. We wrote code. We wrote the first drafts of the way they might live.

Zoe’s workshop accepted her with a scholarship. “I want to build tools the bad guys don’t see coming,” she said.

“Then you also have to build communities where people aren’t alone,” I said.

“I have you,” she said.

“Always,” I said. “And you have you.”

At the shelter, Vanessa and Sarah and I sat with a whiteboard and mapped entry points, both digital and human. “When someone says he loves me,” Vanessa said, “and there’s a tracker on her phone, we don’t argue with the word love. We argue with the behavior. We give her a plan.” She looked at me. “You gave me a plan.”

“You gave me proof,” I said. “We saved each other’s lives.”

We made a list of the ways a person can be held hostage without a visible rope. We wrote the corresponding ways to cut each line.

 

On a Sunday in December, I opened a drawer and found the letter Eric had written—apologies, explanations, a catalogue of regrets that might have been useful if we were people made of paper. I put it back. I don’t keep it out of sentiment. I keep it because it reminds me what I didn’t choose.

Winter loosened its teeth. The day the first crocus pushed its ridiculous face up through the city dirt, Sarah sent a photo to the group chat with the caption we bloom, even here. Zoe replied with a gif of a dragon breathing glitter. I sent a heart. Vanessa sent a screenshot: SecureTrack servers seized. Marcus sent three words: On to schools. The plan was working, but more important, the we was.

The last night of the semester, the Truth & Tools kids presented final projects that actually worked: a consent-based photo-sharing prototype; a plug-in that forces terms-of-service into plain language; a small physical switch you can attach to your phone to kill power to the mic and camera with a snap. “I made this for my mom,” one student said, holding up her switch. “She didn’t know what she didn’t know. Now she does.”

 

After class, a senior named Lila hung back. “Professor,” she said, eyes doing that dance between defiance and shame, “how do you stop feeling stupid for not seeing it sooner?”

“You don’t,” I said. “You outgrow the version of yourself who needed to be lied to. You fall in love with the version who doesn’t.”

When she left, Zoe popped into the room with two coffees and the look kids have when they want to be told something is possible. “Marcus says the governor wants the program at a state level,” she said. “Also, I got asked to speak at the conference with you.”

“You’re better than me at the part where code meets humans,” I said. “You should do all the talking.”

She rolled her eyes. “We do it together.”

Later, in our kitchen that would never be big enough for everything we wanted to cook, Sarah asked the question that had started to feel like a mantra. “You ready to change the world?”

“No,” I said, smiling as I laid plates on the table we’d named and renamed until it felt like an old friend. “But I’m ready to change ours. And that’s a start.”

We ate. We laughed. We wrote another line of the future with the ordinary tools within reach: forks, light, people who choose you back. And when my phone buzzed with a number I didn’t recognize, I let it ring. Then I turned it over and kept talking to my daughter about the encryption method she wanted to test next and about the plot hole in the sci-fi movie she refused to admit was terrible.

In the beginning, I thought it was about revenge. Then I thought it was about justice. Now I know it’s about building something better than what tried to break us.

And yes, sometimes you burn things down.

But then—if you’re lucky, and stubborn, and surrounded by people who refuse to teach your eyes to lie—you plant.

END!