The sound of my husband’s voice filled the dining room, telling another woman how incredible she was, right as his boss was making a toast to our marriage.
He told me I was crazy. He said I was just insecure.
He bought me the smart speaker as a gift, something to make my life “easier” while he was working late nights. He didn’t know it was listening to everything.
He didn’t know his little helper kept a record of all his secrets.
He thought that little speaker was his ticket to a perfect double life, but it ended up buying me this house and turning my story into something that paid better than his job ever did.
The Hum of Suspicion: A Gift for “Us”
The box was sitting on the kitchen island when I got back from the grocery store, sleek and white and minimalist. It looked like it belonged in a museum of the near future. Mark was leaning against the counter, smiling that smile he used for closing deals and placating flight attendants.
“What’s this?” I asked, setting the heavy bags down. The paper handles crinkled, the only sound in the room.
“It’s for us,” he said, his voice smooth as bourbon. He slid the box toward me. “It’s an Aura. The new smart speaker. It can do everything. Order groceries, play music, answer any question you can think of. I figured, since you’re home so much with your design work, it could be like… a little helper.”
I stared at the box. On the side, a smiling, ethnically ambiguous family was asking their Aura to turn down the lights. It felt less like a gift and more like an indictment of my life. I’m a freelance graphic designer. Yes, I work from home. Our daughter, Chloe, is away at her first year of college, and the house is quiet. Too quiet. But I didn’t need a “helper.” I needed my husband back from the late nights he’d been putting in, from the new, unreadable distance in his eyes.
“Wow, Mark. It’s… a lot.” I forced a smile. “Thank you.”
He wrapped his arms around me from behind, his chin resting on my shoulder. He smelled faintly of expensive soap and something else. Something floral and unfamiliar. “I just want to make your life easier, Sarah. You deserve it.”
I leaned back into him, my body stiff. The cold, smooth cardboard of the box was pressed against my fingers. I knew, with a certainty that settled deep in my bones, that this wasn’t about making my life easier. It was about making his easier.
Late Nights, Cold Shoulders
The late nights were becoming the rule, not the exception. It was always a last-minute client dinner, a quarterly report that had to be perfect, a team that needed wrangling. The excuses were always plausible, delivered with just the right amount of weary frustration that made questioning them feel like an accusation. Tonight was no different.
He walked in just after eleven, loosening his tie. I was in the kitchen, wiping down counters that were already clean, the motion a familiar outlet for the anxious energy thrumming under my skin.
“Hey,” he murmured, dropping his briefcase by the door. “Long one.”
“You didn’t answer my text,” I said, my voice flat. I kept my back to him, focusing on a non-existent smudge on the granite.
“Sorry, my phone died. We were at that steakhouse downtown with the guys from the Denver office. Daniel insisted.” He came up behind me, and that scent was there again, stronger this time. Not his soap. Not my perfume. Something sweet and cloying.
I turned around slowly, my hand gripping the edge of the counter. “Your phone died?”
“Yeah. Just plugged it in.” He avoided my eyes, busying himself with getting a glass of water from the fridge. His movements were just a little too deliberate. A little too casual.
“That’s funny,” I said, my voice dangerously quiet. “Because I saw the little ‘read’ notification under my message at nine-fifteen.”
He froze, his back still to me. The silence stretched, filled only by the hum of the refrigerator. He turned, and for a second, the charming mask slipped. I saw a flash of panic, of pure, cornered-animal fear. Then it was gone, replaced by practiced exasperation.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Sarah. Are we doing this again? I must have seen it and gotten pulled away before I could reply. My mind is fried. I’m working my ass off for us, for this family, and I come home to an interrogation.” He made it my fault. He was a master at that. He could twist reality until I was the one left apologizing. But not tonight. I just stared at him, the chill from the granite seeping into my fingers.
The Aura in the Room
Mark set up the Aura on the kitchen counter, right between the coffee maker and my antique recipe box. It was a stark white cylinder, its single blue light pulsing gently like a slow, sleeping breath. It didn’t fit. My kitchen was warm woods and colorful tile, a space I’d curated with flea market finds and Chloe’s childhood art. The Aura was an alien artifact, cold and sterile.
“Aura, play some jazz,” Mark commanded. Smooth, instrumental jazz immediately filled the room. Mark beamed. “See? Easy.”
For the next few days, it became a strange third party in our house. Mark loved showing it off, asking it for the weather, for stock prices, for sports scores. His voice, when he spoke to it, was confident and clear. My voice felt hesitant.
“Aura,” I’d start, then pause. “Set a timer for twenty minutes.”
“Setting a timer for twenty minutes,” it would reply in its calm, feminine, vaguely robotic voice. It was always listening. I was a designer; I understood the principles of user experience. The device was designed to be seamless, to integrate, to disappear into the background of a life. But I could feel its presence constantly. It was a silent witness in the corner of my eye while I worked on logos at my laptop, its blue light occasionally swirling for no reason.
It was an unwelcome observer to the stilted conversations Mark and I now had over dinner. It heard the long silences, the careful, polite questions that were landmines of unspoken accusations. The house, which had once been my sanctuary, now felt like a surveillance state of my own making. The quiet wasn’t just quiet anymore; it was the sound of a device waiting for a command.
A Voice in the Static
It was one in the morning. I was trying to finish a branding proposal for a new client, my eyes gritty with fatigue. The house was dead quiet. Mark had come home hours ago, mumbled something about being exhausted, and fallen asleep instantly. The jazz I’d asked the Aura to play earlier had long since faded into a playlist of mournful, late-night trumpets.
“Aura, stop,” I said, my voice raspy.
The music cut out. The silence that rushed in was absolute. I rubbed my temples, staring at the glowing screen of my laptop. And then I heard it.
A whisper.
It was faint, indistinct, like a radio signal from a distant galaxy. It was a woman’s voice, I thought, but it was so brief and garbled I couldn’t be sure. It sounded like it came directly from the speaker. I straightened up, my heart starting to pound a low, heavy drumbeat against my ribs. The room was empty. The windows were closed.
“Aura?” I said, my voice trembling slightly. “What did you say?”
The blue light on the cylinder swirled to life. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,” the familiar, cheerful voice replied. “I can tell you the weather, play a song, or answer a question.”
I stared at it, my breath held tight in my chest. Was I losing my mind? Was the stress and suspicion finally making me hear things? I was so tired. It was probably nothing. The house settling. My imagination. I was about to turn back to my work when a new thought, cold and sharp, cut through the fog of exhaustion.
I stood up and walked over to the speaker, my reflection a pale ghost on its smooth white surface. I leaned in close.
“Aura,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “Are you always listening?”
There was a pause. The blue light swirled, processing my question. It felt like an eternity. Then, it spoke.
“I only record when I hear the wake word. Would you like to review your command history?”
The Digital Witness: Opening Pandora’s Box
My command history. The offer hung in the silent kitchen, both a technical solution and a terrifying invitation. My hands were shaking as I unlocked my phone and downloaded the Aura app. I’d ignored it until now, letting Mark handle the setup. Now, I navigated the clean, corporate interface with a sense of dread.
There it was: “History.” I tapped it.
A list appeared, a mundane diary of the last week.
“Aura, play some jazz.” (Voice: Mark)
“Aura, what’s the weather?” (Voice: Mark)
“Aura, set a timer for twenty minutes.” (Voice: Sarah)
“Aura, how many cups in a quart?” (Voice: Sarah)
I scrolled and scrolled, my thumb flying across the screen. It was all there, our stilted lives logged and timestamped. Mark asking about the score of a game. Me asking to hear a podcast. It was a perfect record of our domesticity, and it contained absolutely nothing.
A wave of something like shame washed over me. I was pathetic. I was a jealous, paranoid wife, so desperate to find proof that I was interrogating the kitchen appliances. Mark was right. I was the one with the problem. I was the one creating this drama, inventing whispers in the static. I closed the app, my anger at him dissolving into a hollow disgust with myself.
For the next few days, I tried. I really did. I tried to be the wife he said he wanted. I didn’t ask where he was going. I smiled when he came home. I suggested we watch a movie. I was playing a part, and the performance was exhausting me down to my bones. The Aura sat on the counter, a silent monument to my own foolishness.
The Recipe for Heartbreak
On Thursday, I decided to cook. Not just heat up leftovers, but actually cook something that required effort. Lasagna. The kind I used to make for Sunday dinners when Chloe was little, the kind that made the whole house smell like garlic and home. It felt like an act of faith, a ritual to exorcise the ugliness that had taken root in my marriage.
I had the ground beef browning in the pan, the aroma filling the kitchen. I couldn’t find my grandmother’s recipe card, the one I kept in the wooden box right next to the Aura. I must have moved it.
“Whatever,” I muttered to myself. “I’ll just look it up.”
I wiped my hands on my apron. “Aura,” I said, my voice louder than it had been in days. “Give me a recipe for classic lasagna.”
The blue light swirled. “Certainly. For a classic lasagna, you will need…” The voice paused. There was a faint crackle of static, like a needle skipping on a record. And then, a different voice came out of the speaker.
It was Mark.
His voice was low, intimate, stripped of the polished confidence he used in public. It was a voice I hadn’t heard in years, a voice he had once used only for me.
“You’re incredible,” he said, his words a soft caress. “I can’t stop thinking about last night.”
There was a soft laugh, a woman’s laugh. It was light and airy and young. It was not my laugh.
“Then stop leaving,” she replied, her voice playful, seductive.
The recording was only ten seconds long. It cut off as abruptly as it began, and the Aura’s default voice picked up right where it left off. “…one pound of ground beef, one onion, chopped…”
I didn’t hear the rest of the ingredients. The wooden spoon fell from my hand and clattered onto the tile floor. The sound echoed in the sudden, vast silence of the kitchen. My blood ran cold, then hot. It wasn’t a whisper. It wasn’t my imagination. It was real. And it was so much worse than I could have ever imagined.
A Different Kind of Conversation
My first instinct was to smash it. To pick up the smooth white cylinder and hurl it against the wall, to shatter it into a thousand pieces. My hands were clenched into fists at my sides, my knuckles white. The smell of the browning meat was suddenly sickening. I lunged for the stove and turned off the burner.
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