Jonah’s studio hums like the archive—fans, drives, my pulse. The big monitor washes the room in aquarium light, all blue and gray and flicker. I sit forward with my elbows on my knees and taste old coffee and sea salt on my tongue. He cues the file again, keyboard clacking like rain on a tin roof.
“Back six frames,” I say.
“Six?” he says. “You’re getting greedy.”
“I’m getting precise.”
The cursor inches left, the time code stuttering backward: 01:12:43.20, .15, .10. The harbor-cam sees everything and nothing. Grain as big as hail. Headlights smeared into comets. The ER entrance glows like a modest stage under a plastic canopy that defies wind only out of habit.
“Play,” I say.
He taps. The street glides forward. A boxy shadow slides into view, heavy and sure even in black and white. I lean closer; my breath fogs the glass for a heartbeat. The car noses toward the curb, hesitates, and then—there—a flare. The right taillight pops bright as the driver taps the brake. Blood-red in my memory even though the footage is grayscale.
“Stop,” I say, too loud.
Jonah freezes the frame. Pixels swarm like gnats trying to become a picture. The angle is bad, but the silhouette is not. Short trunk, high waist, curved roofline that belongs to a specific kind of money.
“That’s a Bentley,” I say. “Not a nurse’s Corolla.”
Jonah squints. “I’ll take the model confirmation from the town’s accidental car savant,” he says, not mocking, just calibrating.
“She loved that line,” I say. “She said it was ‘tasteful power’ with a face like a sermon. She refused to install a backup camera because she said people should learn to look behind them with their own eyes.”
“And here she was,” he says quietly, “looking behind her.”
I roll the wheel a frame at a time. The tail light flares again as the car kisses the curb. A blur of a person—coat, maybe fur, maybe shadow—moves at the passenger side. The timestamp nails the minute to the wall: 01:13:02.
“Beatrice said just after one,” I say. “She said she heard a door with money in it.”
Jonah’s fingers dance. He opens a window with a spreadsheet he built out of paper scraps and microfilm photographs. “Hospital intake shows twin entries at 01:06 and 01:11. Then the asterisk. The ‘deceased’ notation gets keyed at 01:14 on the log’s adjacent page. Sloppy but legible.” He overlays the footage time code on the grid, translucent numbers breathing over columns like a second tide.
“The bell,” I say without meaning to, and he glances at me.
“Sea Ledger?”
“Same tone for donations and deaths,” I say. “I hear it in timestamps now.”
We watch the frozen flare a moment longer, two people holding our breath for pixels. The studio smells of printer toner and warm dust; the harbor through the cracked window smells of kelp and gasoline. Somewhere below us, a night-shift fisherman laughs, short and hoarse, and a gull answers like it always has something to add.
“Run it again,” I say. “Then zoom in on the grille.”
“Grille is going to be a Rorschach,” he warns.
“I can read inkblots.”
He plays the ten seconds that matter. The Bentley slows, brake popping twice. The passenger door opens a disciplined inch and closes again. No one hurries. Hurrying is for people without pins in their lapels.
“Freeze,” I say.
He punches in. Blocks become bigger blocks. The grille could be a cathedral or a toaster or a confession. Then the hood glints in a way that only polished money does, even in bad light.
“Her car,” I say, not for drama but because there’s a shelf in my head that holds shapes I grew up taking for granted. “She keeps a small anchor charm on the key ring. In case she forgets where her mercy came from.”
He doesn’t smile. “We can’t prove keychains to a judge,” he says.
“We can prove presence,” I say. “Location, time, proximity. A shape that fits a title and a set of habits.”
He nods and draws lines between cells: footage—>time—>microfilm notations—>Beatrice’s interview statements. He drags the lines to align; they snap into place with a tiny digital click that feels bigger than a bell.
Micro-hook: I reach for the screen and stop myself, like touching would smudge a fingerprint we need. My hand shakes in the space between air and evidence; I close the fingers into a fist and press the knuckles against my thigh.
“Run the adjacent cam,” I say. “The one mounted by the valet stand.”
“Already pulled,” he says. “Footage is worse, and there’s salt on the lens, but the angle catches a reflection in the ER door.”
He brings it up. The door is a rectangle of murk. When the Bentley’s brake pulses, the reflection finds a spine. A sliver of the grille grows teeth.
“Widow’s Teeth,” I say, and the word makes him turn.
“The shoal?”
“The reflection,” I say. “Teeth in water. I keep seeing it everywhere.”
“Good,” he says. “It keeps you honest. Keeps me afraid.”
“I need us afraid,” I say. “Fear tells me where the edges are.”
He pulls out a small notebook and writes the time three ways: 1:13 AM Harbor Cam, 1:14 AM microfilm asterisk, 1:11–1:14 Beatrice’s recollection. He underlines once. “We have sequence,” he says. “We have corroboration. We have a car shaped like a signature.”
“Now we back it up,” I say. “Three locations, two formats. One set to auto-send if anyone knocks.”
“Already mirroring to the offsite,” he says, pointing at a small blinking light that looks modest enough to be trusted. “And a drive labeled ‘Sextants & Mentorships’ for when someone pokes around without knowing my jokes. People in this town will always move auction catalogs aside instead of opening them.”
I try to laugh and it comes out small. The yacht club had lined antique sextants beside venture-capital “mentorships” like talismans; I remember hands in linen sleeves bidding on access while old fishermen ate chowder in the kitchen and calculated mortgage extensions. Old-line families hire those same fishermen to watch their empty houses off-season; the men learn to see in the dark. So do we.
Jonah rewinds because he needs to believe it twice. We watch the flare again and I feel my shoulders rise as if the brake is under my own foot. The Bentley drifts forward and disappears past the canopy. The grain inhales, holds, exhales.
“High-five?” he says, unexpected boyness breaking through his careful voice.
“We’re not twelve,” I say.
“We are for one second,” he says, holds up his hand.
I slap it. We both grin so fast it hurts, and the sound we make is maybe joy, maybe shock. My palm stings. I want to keep it stinging.
We drop our hands in the same heartbeat, sober eyes snapping back to the screen. The studio’s door looks thin. The windows look like invitations.
“She’ll know,” I say. “When I move with this, she’ll smell the shift like lemon oil under a closed door.”
“Legal intimidation first,” he says. “Then a moral education letter, swaddled in sympathy, asking if you’re sure you want to hurt the foundation. After that, maybe a car parked outside, maybe not.”
“The car has already parked,” I say. I remember the purr below my building, the way the engine’s patience rubbed against my bones. “Now she’ll add paperwork that feels like prayer.”
He nods slowly. “We need to control the sequence. We control what is known and in what order. We give the judge the timestamps with the microfilm reproductions and Beatrice’s sworn statement. No gossip, no podcast, no leaks.”
“You’re saying that to yourself,” I say.
“I’m saying it out loud so we both hear it,” he replies. “I record people for a living; this is me recording a vow. No publish. Embargo holds.”
I breathe that in and let my shoulders drop from my ears. “We should transcribe Beatrice’s key lines verbatim and fold them into my affidavit,” I say. “We should add the chain-of-custody for the blanket sample. Not the blanket itself yet, only that it exists.”
“And we do not name Tamsin,” he says.
“We do not,” I say. I taste the name like a seed I refuse to spit into the open.
He brings up the overlay again and aligns the vertical red rule with the instant the brake blooms. The microfilm column glows like a confession strip, pale and steady. “Her presence doesn’t prove the swap,” he says, voice clinical now, “but it collapses her plausible absence. It makes Beatrice’s story a scaffold that holds weight.”
“And it makes my mother’s sentences shorter,” I say. “Her vocabulary shrinks when proof moves into the room.”
He smirks without joy. “Mercy has fewer syllables under oath.”
I stand and walk to the window. The harbor curves away, that crescent scar catching the afternoon’s last light across the shoal. Widow’s Teeth wears foam like old lace. The town below us smells like kelp and fry oil from a shack that refuses to close for winter. A brass ship’s bell at Sea Ledger can’t be heard from here, but I hear it anyway; it’s lodged where my breath turns back from my ribs.
“Gimme the drive,” I say. “Label it something no one will steal.”
“Done,” he says, sliding a thumbdrive in a sandwich bag that reads MAYO in Sharpie. “You’ll put this where lawyers go to nap.”
“Berridge copier room,” I say. “Behind the ream of cardstock no one dares touch.”
“Printer toner smell will cover your tracks,” he says.
We return to the timeline because staring at proof teaches my nerves how to stand still. Jonah jots a to-do list: contact offsite counsel for video authentication; draft statement for chain-of-custody of digital media; request hospital parking logs under public-records statute. He writes plate match? and circles it.
“Can we pull a plate?” I ask, knowing the answer.
“Not from this,” he says, tapping the pixels. “But we can corroborate by absence. If the hospital logs show ‘no valet on duty’ that night, and the ER camera shows the car too close to the canopy to be anyone who fears a ticket, the habit points back to a person who never learned to park like everyone else.”
“She does valet even when valet has gone home,” I say. “She tips with board seats.”
Jonah’s mouth tilts. Then he sobers again. “Let’s talk retaliation plan.”
“I inventory everything sensitive tonight,” I say. “I put copies at the Salt Finch. I start a log for who follows and when. I buy a cheap webcam for my hallway and send you the feed. I tell Nora at the archives to expect no one; if someone arrives, she calls me and uses the code for ‘fire drill’ like we practiced.”
“You carry two phones,” he says. “One she knows; one she doesn’t.”
“I already do,” I say. I touch the burner in my pocket and think of Tamsin’s first text, the conditional trust inside it, the words that learned to move without a trail.
Micro-hook: A notification pings on his second screen—a calendar reminder he set to mark the hospital’s night, seventeen years and a handful of storms ago. The tiny chime makes my skin rise. He clicks it away like batting a fly, but the ripple remains.
“We need a copy for a judge that cannot be argued down by a lighting expert on retainer,” he says. “I’ll reach out to a guy who certifies chain-of-custody for video. He’s stubborn and his invoices read like hymnals, but his footnotes scare other footnotes.”
“Good,” I say. “I want footnotes that bite.”
He grins for half a second. “I’ll also pull weather logs. Cloud cover that night can counter any claim that reflections come from a passing truck.”
“Widow’s Teeth had a low tide the next morning,” I say. “I remember because my father used to schedule meetings around tides, as if water kept his calendar. If we can show harbor patterns and ER activity, we can bind the timelines tighter.”
“I’ll get the NOAA data,” he says, already typing.
The monitor returns to the flare because we can’t help ourselves. It’s a lighthouse now, small and stubborn. I picture Vivienne’s hand on the wheel, rings cool as policy, and the anchor charm biting her palm when she turned. Protecting family by unmaking truth. Protecting legacy by calling it mercy.
“I want to ask her why she was there,” I say. “I want the words under oath, not over oysters.”
“Oysters are how she writes history,” he says. “Oath is how you do it.”
We pack the drives, two for me, one for him, one for the offsite. He labels mine with tape that used to hold Christmas lights; the adhesive clings like it remembers joy but agrees to work for fear. I tuck one in my bag, one in the waistband of my jeans under my sweater, because paranoia looks good on me now.
“Walk you out?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “Stay here and watch the feed mirror. Text me when the offsite chimes.”
He nods. I reach the door and hesitate, hand on the knob slick with a thin film of thermoplastic and sweat. “We high-fived,” I say without turning. “In case we needed to remember there was a second when this felt like winning.”
“We’ll need that,” he says softly. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in court.”
The hallway smells like someone heated fish at midnight last week and the smell never forgot. The stairwell carries a draft cold enough to bite my wet eyes dry. From the landing I can see the harbor again through a small window: Graypoint curled tight against its own secrets, the shoal grinning in the distance, fishermen’s trucks lined along piers as if guarding estates from the water itself.
My phone vibrates. A new email from Berridge & Knox—Reception: A courier delivered an envelope addressed to you. No return name. I picture thick stationery, lemon oil like a halo, a sentence that uses the word regrettable with professional grace.
I hold the drive in my fist and ask the question to the pixel still burning in my head, to the bell I hear even when the room is silent, to the anchor charm that may have pressed a small bruise in a driver’s palm:
When I open the envelope waiting on my desk, will the threat come dressed as mercy again—or will she finally stop pretending the flares she sends are anything but warnings aimed at my heart?