Liam’s office door glides shut behind us with a soft click that lands heavier than the HOA gavel ever did.
He reaches for the wall panel and dials the lights down in slow increments. The recessed LEDs fade to a murky twilight, the room shrinking until the monitors become the brightest objects—a constellation of glass rectangles humming with frozen scenes. My wineglass sweats on the desk, a red half-moon of liquid catching stray pixels.
Outside his wide window, Maple Hollow is a smeared postcard: fog lying low in the cul-de-sac, porch lights blurring into soft, accusing eyes. Headlights slide past one house over and leave streaks of white across his glass. Somewhere a phone pings—an alert, a camera notification, maybe one more angelversary post floating through the neighborhood feed.
“You can still walk out,” Liam says quietly. “I won’t be offended.”
“Play it,” I say.
My voice sounds wrong in here—too loud against the low hum of machines, too small against the size of his largest monitor. He waits a beat, studying me like he’s checking for cracks in a windshield, then nods and lowers himself into the chair next to mine.
“This is from the first officer on scene,” he says. “Bodycam. There are reports tied to it, but I thought the raw feed would matter more.”
“How did you get it?” I ask.
A faint smile touches his mouth, gone almost immediately. “Combination of public records request and a favor I shouldn’t have called in,” he says. “Don’t quote me on the second part.”
“I don’t quote anyone anymore,” I say. “I just cross-examine.”
Micro-hook: if I treat him like a witness, what happens when the star testimony is my own ghost on a screen?
He doesn’t argue. He turns to the keyboard, fingers moving with the ease of muscle memory, and one of the smaller monitors flickers to a folder tree while the largest fills with a paused frame.
For a moment all I see is darkness and a timestamp in the corner: white numbers over black, alien and familiar. The same date I have memorized in my bones.
“Ready?” he asks.
I curl my fingers harder around the arms of the chair. “No,” I say. “Do it.”
He hits play.
The first thing is sound.
Heavy breathing, muffled by fabric. The low mutter of a police radio, words tangled together: single-vehicle crash, possible fatality, Old Willow Road. Tires hiss on wet asphalt. Somewhere beneath it all, that distant freeway hum that lives in the background of this whole town—a constant, indifferent audience.
The picture lurches into motion. The camera angle bobs, pointed at the dashboard of a moving patrol car. Red and blue reflections dance on the glass, streaking across the windshield like smeared paint.
My chest tightens. I know this road by muscle and nightmare—trees leaning in, guardrail hugging the curve, drainage ditch glinting black.
“He was driving there while I was…” I trail off.
“At home,” Liam supplies, careful. “According to the official timeline.”
According to everyone but my neurons.
The car slows. The frame jitters as the officer’s body shifts. Headlights swing and catch on twisted metal up ahead. For a fractured second the wreck is just an outline in light—a shape that used to be a car. Caleb’s car.
My hand flies to my mouth.
“Pause,” I choke.
Liam taps the key. The video freezes with the patrol car door half open, dash display glowing, my son’s crumpled vehicle a pale carcass in the beams.
“Do you want to stop?” he asks.
“No.” I force my hand down. My nails dig crescent moons into my thigh. “Just… go slower.”
He nods and rewinds a few seconds, then switches to a lower playback speed. The timestamp ticks forward, its seconds dragging like wet feet.
The door opens; the angle drops. The view jolts to chest height as the officer steps out. The world tips, reorients. Flashing lights strobe against rain-slick pavement. The guardrail gleams sickly silver, bent at a wrong angle, like an elbow broken and never set.
The audio spikes—sirens, radio statics, a distant horn blaring and cutting off.
The officer’s voice comes through, clipped and professional. “Unit twelve on scene, single vehicle, stand by.”
He jogs toward the wreck, breathing heavier.
I lean forward, my whole body angled toward the screen, desperate and braced.
I know what my EMDR session says should happen here: Caleb’s profile in the driver’s seat, my own hands shaking on the wheel, shouting, the snap of a seatbelt, the scream of metal.
I see none of that.
The car sits at rest, engine dead, front end accordioned into the guardrail. Windshield spiderwebbed. Driver’s side airbag blown. The camera catches the driver’s door hanging slightly open, not enough to answer any questions. No movement inside.
No me.
“Where am I?” I whisper.
“Keep watching,” Liam says.
The officer circles the front, beam of his flashlight cutting through drizzle. His breath fogs white in the cold air, the puff pushing momentary clouds into the frame. He mutters to himself, words not fully picked up.
“Driver appears unresponsive,” he says louder, into the mic. “No visible passenger.”
The phrase hits like a slap.
No visible passenger.
My EMDR memory rears up in protest—my shoulder against the seat, my hand grabbing the wheel, Caleb’s angry profile inches from mine. The smell of his cologne, sharp and too adult.
On the screen, the officer leans in through the open door. The angle tilts, searching. I catch a flash of Caleb’s hair, his face slack, blood dark on his temple. My lungs clamp.
“Stop,” I whisper. “Please.”
Liam hits pause so quickly the frame freezes mid-swing. The beam of the flashlight streaks across the interior, a white bar over black seats and crumpled dashboard.
I stand up too fast. The room lists. Wine and adrenaline pool in my stomach, sour. I press my fingers to my lips and breathe through my nose until the urge to throw up backs off.
“We don’t have to keep going tonight,” he says. “You don’t need to see everything at once.”
“You told me there was something I had to see,” I manage. “We’re clearly not there yet.”
His eyes search my face. “Then sit,” he says. “And look very carefully at the next part.”
Micro-hook: when the next part arrives with missing minutes, which version of me is going to step into that blank?
I drop back into the chair. My knees buzz, phantom pain crawling up from long-healed skin. I smooth my hands over them, and in the dim I catch a glimpse of the faint, raised scars I rarely let myself catalog.
“Watch the timestamp,” Liam says. He points to the corner of the screen, where white numbers wait. “You see where we are?”
“One twelve a.m.,” I say. The digits burn brighter than the rest of the frame now that he’s called them out. “Right after the officer reaches the car.”
“Right.” His fingers hover over the controls. “I’m going to hit play. Pay attention to the seconds.”
He starts the video again.
The officer backs away from the car, talking into his mic, calling for medics. His boots splash through puddles, the sound picked up sharply by the chest-mounted mic. He turns, sweeping the shoulder, the ditch, the empty darkness beyond the guardrail.
The timestamp ticks: 01:12:03, 01:12:04, 01:12:05—
For a fraction of a second, the image tears sideways, a smear of pixels. The audio hiccups—one breath cut short, the next one starting mid-inhale. The timestamp jumps.
01:15:19.
The officer stands now a few feet away from where he was, angle shifted. The car is more to the left of the frame. The guardrail glints at a slightly different point. The flashlight beam jerks, then steadies, as if nothing happened.
My heart pounds in my ears.
“Did you see that?” Liam asks.
“He moved,” I say. “He—”
“Look again.”
He rewinds, plays the same stretch frame by frame. The timestamp moves, freezes, leaps. Three lost minutes evaporate between one blink and the next.
“That’s not a buffer issue,” Liam says. “The underlying file records this as continuous.”
“Meaning what?” My voice rises. “Someone edited police bodycam? That’s your theory?”
“Meaning that at some point between those two timestamps, either the camera stopped recording or someone cut the footage before it was archived,” he replies. “I can’t tell you which yet.”
He falls silent and hits play.
The officer swings his flashlight toward the ditch.
And there I am.
At first I don’t recognize myself. The figure stumbling into the edge of the beam looks like a stranger—skin milk-pale under the lights, hair plastered wet to her cheeks. She comes from the shadowed shoulder, not the smashed driver’s seat.
Bare feet slap the gravel, pale and vulnerable. Knees streaked with blood and mud. Sleep shorts, too thin for the night air. Caleb’s old hoodie hanging off one shoulder, the logo dark and warped.
“Ma’am, stay back!” the officer shouts, voice suddenly loud in my bones. “You need to stay back, ma’am!”
The woman screams something wordless and keeps going.
I flinch so hard my chair bumps the desk. Wine jumps in the glass; a red arc hits my wrist and trails down, warm and sticky. My own body on the screen lurches toward the wreck, hands outstretched.
“Stop her,” I whisper, irrational, stupid.
“You know how this goes,” Liam says softly.
The officer moves fast now, camera bouncing. He intercepts me, blocks my path. The angle picks up my face, contorted, mouth wide. I don’t hear words—just hoarse noise, shredded by sirens and the storm in the mic. He holds out an arm to keep me from the car.
“Let them work!” he yells. “You’re bleeding. You need to sit down. What’s your name?”
“That’s me,” I say, more to the room than to him.
“Yeah,” Liam says.
The me on screen shoves at the officer’s arm, slips on the wet asphalt, goes down hard on bare knees. The camera jostles as he follows, grabbing for my shoulder. I see the impact in the angle, the sharp shake, the flare of white noise as the mic peaks.
Pain explodes in my own knees in reflex. I press my fingertips into the scars and find the same pattern of damage—two broad patches of roughened skin, offset, like I skidded and then tried to crawl.
EMDR Mara claws for control in my skull, insisting on the image of the passenger seat, the dashboard, my hand grabbing the wheel. This Mara, this real, recorded Mara, comes flailing out of the dark on dirty feet.
“I walked,” I breathe. “I walked there.”
“According to this, yes,” Liam says.
Micro-hook: one version of me drives into the crash, the other arrives after; which one ends up testifying under oath?
The officer keeps talking, trying to anchor me. “Ma’am, I need you to tell me your name,” he repeats. “Were you in the vehicle? Did you see what happened?”
My onscreen voice finally resolves into words.
“My son,” I choke. “My son, my son—Caleb—”
The name cracks on my tongue and on the recording at the same time, present and past overlapping. My throat burns raw now, phantom pain mirroring the hoarse woman in the footage.
“Were you with him?” the officer pushes. “Were you in the car, ma’am?”
There’s a beat where everything slows: rain tapping on metal, sirens wailing farther down the road, the freeway’s distant moan like the world’s longest exhale.
On the screen, I shake my head, hard.
“No,” I say. “No, I was—I was home, I came, I ran—”
The words land in the room like broken glass, reflecting light in too many directions.
I said I wasn’t in the car.
“Pause it,” I croak.
Liam does. The frame freezes on my blotchy, streaked face, mouth mid-word, eyes blown wide with terror.
I can’t look away.
“You see why I wanted you to watch this,” he says quietly.
I jerk my head toward him, anger sparking through the numbness. “So you can prove my EMDR memory is garbage?” I ask. “So you can say, ‘Look, Mara, see, your own mouth contradicts you’? That’s convenient for the company writing your checks.”
He flinches at that, but holds my gaze. “I don’t know what your EMDR memory is yet,” he says. “You haven’t told me specifics. I’m not trying to erase anything. I’m trying to show you that the record outside your head already contradicts itself. The footage jumps. Your statement that night conflicts with what you saw in session. Nothing is simple here.”
“You keep telling me my brain can’t be trusted,” I say. “Now you’re telling me the video might be edited. What do I hang onto, Liam? What the hell counts as real?”
His throat works. For a moment he looks genuinely troubled, like the curtain drops on his strategist face and I glimpse the man who moved in across from a grieving mother on purpose.
“Maybe all of it,” he says. “Maybe none of it. That’s why we need more points. Other cameras, dispatch logs, chain-of-custody records for this file. I can dig on those. But the person who can talk to you about what your brain is doing—that’s not me.”
Dr. Navarro’s face rises in my mind, lit by that soft therapy-room lamp, fingers tapping lightly during EMDR, voice asking, “What comes next?”
“You think she did this to me,” I say.
“I think you need to ask her what role suggestion plays in those sessions,” he answers carefully. “I think she deserves a chance to explain. And I think you deserve to hear it before anyone else frames your memory as evidence for or against you.”
I look back at the frozen image of myself on the screen—barefoot, bloody-kneed, eyes blown wide under the pulse of emergency lights. A woman caught between a wreck she can’t undo and a camera recording a version of events she barely remembers.
My pulse hammers so hard my fingers tingle.
“If I go to her,” I say slowly, “am I asking for help—or handing her a script to keep writing over my life?”
Liam doesn’t answer.
The officer on the screen hangs there in suspended urgency, hand on my shoulder, mouth mid-command. Outside, a car rolls quietly through the fog-choked cul-de-sac, headlights streaking across Liam’s window like a second, ghostly layer of footage.
I sit there between glass and glass—between the screen that insists I arrived on foot and the memory that swears I sat in the car—and realize that whichever one I decide to believe will decide not just what happened that night, but who I am when I say it out loud.
The next words I speak about that road, I think, might end up defining me forever.
And the only person I can confront about that tomorrow is the one who taught me to follow the story in my head until it breaks: Dr. Navarro.