I set up PestLab the night it arrived. One unit in the bedroom. One in the living room.
I'm not going to tell you I immediately stopped checking.
I didn't.
But something subtle shifted that first night.
I plugged it in, got into bed, and reached for the flashlight out of habit.
Then I paused.
Something was already running. Something was already on watch.
I still checked that night. And the next.
But by the end of the first week, something in my body had started just slightly to release.
Not because I told myself to relax.
Because there was now a physical, external answer to the question my nervous system had been asking for four years:
Is something watching?
Yes. It's plugged in. It's on.
Four months later, the flashlight is in my nightstand drawer.
My girlfriend noticed before I mentioned it.
"You don't do the thing anymore," she said one morning.
"What thing?"
"The sheet thing. Before bed."
She was right.
I hadn't done it in eleven days.
For the first time since I was 26, I got into bed and just... went to sleep.