I took my sister’s laptop in for repair. The technician whispered: “You should see this before deciding whether to call 911.”

I took my sister’s laptop in for repair on a rainy Thursday afternoon, expecting nothing more dramatic than a cracked hinge and a dead battery.

The shop was a narrow place in downtown Portland, squeezed between a laundromat and a tax office, with old gaming posters curling at the corners of the walls and a bell above the door that rang too sharply when I came in. My younger sister, Lumi, had dropped her laptop two nights earlier while carrying groceries up three flights of apartment stairs. She was a freelance illustrator and guarded that computer like it held her heartbeat. Since she was across town meeting a client, she’d begged me to take it in.

“Just don’t let them snoop,” she had said over the phone.

I almost laughed thinking about that as the technician, a broad-shouldered man named Mason with tired eyes and a wedding ring, set the silver laptop on the counter and booted it up.

At first, everything seemed normal. He checked the hinge, tested the charging port, and muttered something about a bent casing. Then the screen flickered once, and a desktop appeared. Mason’s fingers froze over the keyboard.

He leaned closer.

“What?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away. His face had gone tight in a way that made my stomach drop. He looked toward the back room, then back at me, lowered his voice, and said, “You should see this before deciding whether to call 911.”

I blinked at him. “Why?”

Without another word, he turned the screen toward me.

I was frozen.

At first I didn’t understand what I was looking at. It was a folder window, already open, filled with dozens of video files. The filenames were dates and street names. There were also still images—grainy shots of apartment buildings, parking garages, playgrounds, and women walking alone, taken from a distance. My throat closed.

One of the thumbnails showed a woman in a red coat standing outside a daycare, holding a little boy’s hand.

I knew that coat.

It belonged to Flora.

My ex-girlfriend.

Below that file were several others named after locations I recognized instantly: Hawthorne Market. Pine Street Garage. Eastbank Trail.

Places Flora went all the time.

My mouth went dry. “No.”

Mason clicked one file open. A shaky video started playing, recorded from inside a parked car. Flora came into view, carrying coffee, unaware she was being watched. The timestamp in the corner was from eleven days ago.

My hands began to tremble so violently I had to grip the counter.

“This has to be some mistake,” I whispered.

But it got worse.

Another folder was labeled VICKY.

My older sister’s name.

Mason opened it only halfway before I stopped him. I had already seen enough—a shot of Vicky unlocking the front gate to her condo, another of her jogging by the river, another taken through what looked like the window of a café.

My pulse pounded in my ears.

“This is stalking material,” Mason said carefully. “I didn’t want to assume, but if this belongs to your sister, you need to figure out whether she’s in danger or whether someone else used this machine. Either way, this is police-level.”

My mind reeled. Lumi? Sweet, chaotic Lumi, who cried over injured pigeons and forgot to pay parking meters? It made no sense. It was impossible.

And yet the evidence glowed from the screen in cold, organized rows.

At the very top of the desktop was a text file.

Its title was only three words.

If anything happens.

I stared at it, unable to breathe.
Then I double-clicked…