Episode 01
The Coldwater Lease
A man paid to review trail-camera photographs from a hunting lease he's never visited realizes the Coldwater account was never about deer — it was months of something patiently documenting him, laundered through his own habit of not looking too closely.
He reviews trail-camera photographs for hunting leases across the Texas Hill Country — a gig-economy job of deer counts and buck scores that pays by the card and asks nothing of him but a glance. He tells you upfront that he'd let his standards slip to a rubber stamp long before any of this started, and that the account called Coldwater seemed, at first, like nothing more than easy money: sixty dollars at a time, cash in a padded envelope, no name attached, more than anyone had ever paid him to look at pictures of deer.
Then card fourteen starts coming back. The same frame, the same buck at the edge of the same fence line — except each time it returns, one small detail has shifted. A timestamp reads 3:41 instead of 3:14. A shadow sits rotated further than any moon allows. A mesquite that wasn't there before is back in almost the right place, like someone noticed it missing and rehung it. He tells himself it's a bad card, a drifting clock, a client with too much time on his hands.
It's the kind of wrongness that only shows itself to a man who finally decides to actually look instead of skim — and by the time he understands what he's been signing off on every month, he's already learned how close the Coldwater property runs to his own back fence.
Spoiler-light synopsis — the full story is in the episode above.