My husband always forbade me to go near the air conditioner, but one day it broke while he was away on a business trip: I had to call a repairman, he opened the casing, looked inside — and said in terror: “Take your children and get out of this house immediately…” 

My husband often disappeared on business trips. He would leave for weeks, sometimes without even warning me. The apartment was filled with a heavy, suffocating silence, and only his strict rules echoed constantly in my mind. One of them — never call repairmen, especially for the air conditioner, and never try to fix it myself. No matter what I asked, he always replied the same way: “Don’t touch it. I’ll fix it.”

When Viktor left again and his silver SUV disappeared around the corner, I felt relief for the first time.

But suddenly the air conditioner screeched, thumped, and shut down completely. Already the fifth time that week. My husband kept fixing it, and it kept breaking again.

The room suddenly became stifling hot. The children lay on the floor — sluggish, sleepy, their faces shiny.

I called Viktor. He didn’t pick up right away. In the background I heard voices, a woman’s laughter… and a child’s.

“The air conditioner broke again, I’m calling a repairman, you don’t know how to fix it,” I said.

“Don’t you dare!” he shouted sharply. “No repairmen. No one is allowed inside the house. I said so!”

The call dropped so abruptly it felt intentional.

I stood still for a minute, then opened the app anyway and ordered a repairman. An hour later, a man with a toolbox rang the doorbell.

He examined the unit, set up a ladder, climbed up, and carefully removed the air conditioner’s cover.

And then his expression changed. His eyes became hard, tense. As if he had seen something he was never meant to see.

“Ma’am, has anyone worked on this air conditioner before?” he asked.

“Yes, my husband. Many times. It breaks almost every day.”

“Where are your children?” he asked quietly but sharply.

“In the kitchen… Is something wrong?”

He took a respirator out of his toolbox, put it on as if preparing for dangerous work, and only then looked back at me. There was panic in his eyes.

“Take your children and get out of this house right now. Immediately. Quickly…” 

Continuation in the first comment 

I couldn’t breathe.

“What did you find?”

He pulled out a flat block from the top of the air conditioner, covered in dust. At first I thought it was a filter. But inside I saw tiny diodes. A small lens. Soldering. An antenna.

“This is not part of the air conditioner,” he said. “It’s a camera. A good one. It records 24/7 and sends the data to a remote server.”

My hands turned cold.

“You mean… someone was watching us?”

“For a long time,” the repairman replied. “And professionally.”

I stood there, unable to breathe. Thoughts spun in my head: his long “business trips,” his sudden fits of jealousy, his strange questions about who visited me during the day. And the fact that he forbade me to touch the air conditioner, as if it hid something sacred.

The repairman placed the camera into a bag.

“You need to decide what to do next. But leaving this as it is is not an option.”

After he left, I sat in the kitchen for a long time, keeping my children close.

Only then did I fully understand that his “business trips” were just a cover. He lived with another woman, cheated on me, and at the same time spied on me. He suspected me of exactly what he himself was doing.