The curve on Old Willow looks smaller when I’m not watching paramedic lights bounce off the guardrail.
I pull the car onto the graveled shoulder anyway, tires crunching in the same rhythm my heart took on the night Caleb died. The air tastes like wet metal and pine. Fog hangs low over the road, thinner than the Maple Hollow soup but still blurring the red taillights that streak past us on the main lane.
Tessa clicks off the podcast mid-sentence. “Tell me again why we’re doing this in the dark?”
“Because lights reflect,” I say, cutting the engine. “Daytime glare would drown out anything small or hidden. At night, anything with glass stands out.”
“So we’re looking for shiny things over a ditch.” She pushes open her door, hugging her jacket tighter around her scrubs. “Great.”
Cold air rushes in, carrying the faint hiss of freeway traffic from farther off and the chemical tang of someone’s distant cigarette. I grab my phone and keys, then step onto the uneven shoulder. Gravel shifts under my boots. Across the narrow ditch, the guardrail waits, silver and scarred, the section that failed Caleb patched with a newer segment that still looks wrong to me.
I force my eyes up, toward the overpass.
“You sure you saw a camera last time?” Tessa asks, coming around the front of the car. Her breath shows in quick puffs. “Could’ve been a junction box or whatever.”
“I saw glass,” I say. “A dome. Mounted under the bridge. I didn’t know to look hard then.”
I open the flashlight app on my phone. White light blasts the darkness, too bright at first, then narrows when I slide the intensity down. I angle the beam along the concrete belly of the overpass, tracing rust streaks and spider webs and bolts furry with old paint.
“Start at the center support,” I say. “They’d want the widest view of the curve.”
Tessa mutters something about horror movies and haunted guardrails, but she flicks on her own light and follows me toward the concrete pillar. Our beams crisscross, thin swords of light that make the underside of the bridge look like a stage before a show starts.
Micro-hook: if there’s a camera here, it saw Caleb’s last seconds better than my own eyes ever will.
We stop beside the pillar. Up close, the concrete smells damp and chalky. Spray paint ghosts linger in faint arcs, old graffiti buffed out but not erased. I tip my head back until my neck protests, moving the light in slow arcs.
“Anything?” Tessa asks.
“Just bolts,” I say. “And a spider who hates us.”
“Well, that tracks,” she says. “You’ve been yanking on the web for months.”
I step closer to the ditch, careful with my footing. The water down there murmurs over rocks, oil rainbow shimmering on the surface where someone’s car leaked its story. I sweep the light along the beams again, slower. There—on the far side of the pillar, half tucked behind the lip of a girder—something breaks the symmetry.
“There.” My voice comes out sharper than I intend. I point. “Go a little right of my beam.”
Tessa shifts. “I see… a rectangle?” She squints. “Or my eyeballs are tired.”
“No, that’s a housing,” I say. “Look at the edges. That’s not poured concrete. That’s a box bolted underneath.”
The box is painted the same dull gray as the bridge, but the corners are too crisp. In the center, recessed, a dark glass dome glints at us, catching and flipping back our phone beams in miniature.
Glass, watching the curve.
My throat tightens. “There you are,” I whisper.
“So they had a camera,” Tessa says. “Why didn’t the report mention it?”
“Maybe it did in the parts I never saw,” I say. “Or maybe someone liked what it captured and decided to keep it close.”
“Mara.” Her voice softens. “Hey. Don’t sprint ahead. We don’t know what it shows.”
“We don’t know whether it still exists,” I say. “That’s the point.”
I step back, craning for another angle. Under the housing, a small sticker peels at one corner. The letters nearest us glow faintly when our beams hit them, reflective ink catching the light.
“There’s a service label,” I say. “I need to read it.”
“And how do you propose we do that, Stretch?” Tessa gives the support pillar a skeptical look. “We left your climbing harness at home.”
“Very funny.” I glance around. There’s a low concrete ledge near the ditch, part of an old drainage design. If I stand on that and lean… “I don’t need to touch it. Just get close enough to zoom with my camera.”
“I’m calling it now,” she says. “If you fall in that ditch, we’re explaining your ER visit as ‘trip and fall while grieving,’ not ‘went full Nancy Drew on state infrastructure.’”
“All your nursing degrees and that’s the best narrative you’ve got?” I ask.
Her mouth quirks. “Get your picture, novelist.”
I step onto the ledge, balance wobbly for a second, then steady myself with one hand on the clammy pillar. My phone light washes over the housing again. From this angle, I can see the sticker clearly: white background, blue border, a logo that looks like a pixelated eye. Tiny print. A QR code.
My heart thuds.
“I’ve got it,” I say. I switch to the camera app, zoom in, and frame the sticker. The autofocus hunts, then locks. I snap three photos for good measure. In the last shot, the QR code looks crisp enough to scan later.
“Company name?” Tessa asks.
“I’ll check when we’re back in the car,” I say. “I don’t want to drop my phone in corporate runoff.”
A low rumble drifts toward us, deeper than the passing cars. Tessa’s head jerks up.
“That’s a truck,” she says.
The rumble grows into a growl, then into the rasp of heavy tires slowing on gravel. Light washes across the underside of the bridge in a new angle, warm and sweeping. An amber beacon flashes through the fog, painting the concrete in rotating pulses.
I drop off the ledge, landing harder than I mean to. Pain shoots up my ankle.
“Shit,” I hiss.
“Get back to the car,” Tessa says under her breath. “Now.”
Micro-hook: when the person who usually runs toward sirens tells me to run from a truck, I listen.
We move in a half-crouch along the shadow of the pillar. A white utility truck pulls onto the shoulder behind us, logo on the side washed out in the flashing amber. A man in a reflective vest climbs out, slamming the door with the lazy confidence of someone who belongs here.
My pulse spikes. If he calls this in, my name ties to trespassing at the crash site. That’s the kind of data Evelyn Hart could feast on.
“Mara,” Tessa whispers. “Get in the passenger seat. Let me drive the conversation.”
I hesitate. “I need at least one clean shot where I can read the name clearly.”
“You got it,” she says.
“I want to confirm before he yanks that sticker off and calls his boss.”
She looks at me for half a second, weighing risk. Then she nods. “Stay in the dark. Let me be the idiot on the roadside.”
She steps out into the headlight beam, raising one hand.
“Hey!” she calls, voice switching into her professional, airy nurse tone. “Perfect timing. Do you guys have jumper cables or anything? Her car was making a weird noise.”
The maintenance worker squints toward us. He’s in his fifties, stubble dusting his chin, a ball cap pulled low under his hard hat. A safety badge clipped to his vest catches the light, throwing a little glare like a third, smaller headlamp.
“You broke down?” he asks, walking closer. His boots crunch grit.
“Not yet,” Tessa says. She adds a sheepish laugh. “But I’m paranoid. I work nights at St. Francis, so I see every worst-case scenario. Her engine did this little cough, and she wanted to pull over, and then I saw you and thought, ‘Okay, road angel.’”
His shoulders relax a notch. Everyone trusts nurses. I stay in the shadow of the pillar, using his truck as cover. When he turns toward Tessa fully, I slip back onto the concrete ledge, heart pounding in my ears. I lift my phone again, zooming on the sticker.
The logo resolves: VANTAGE DATA SOLUTIONS. Beneath that, smaller type: “Surveillance & Traffic Analytics.” A phone number. A website. The QR code sits in the corner like a tiny black maze.
I tap the shutter button twice, then pull back, hopping off the ledge just as his gaze flicks in my direction.
“You two okay over there?” he calls.
I step into the beam now, phone tucked against my thigh. “Yeah,” I say, summoning my best frazzled-mom voice. “Sorry. We just… needed a minute.”
His eyes flick from my face to the guardrail, then to the floral memorial tied to its post. Recognition passes over his features, dim but there.
“This the one?” he asks. “The drunk kid?”
My fingers curl in my pocket. Tessa jumps in before I swallow my tongue.
“Her son,” she says quietly.
“Ah.” He wets his lips. “I’m sorry.”
He says it like he’s said it before, at other sites, for other mothers.
“You working on the bridge?” Tessa asks, seizing the moment. “Or just cruising around making sure no one steals the guardrail?”
He huffs. “Quarterly systems check,” he says, jerking his thumb toward the underside of the overpass. “Cameras, sensors, that kind of thing. Make sure the state gets its money’s worth.”
The word cameras vibrates in my chest.
“Those feed to the police?” I ask. “Or to the state?”
He shrugs. “We’re just the hardware monkeys. We install, maintain, reboot when stuff freezes. Feeds go to Vantage—HQ’s back in Beaverton. They do all the storage, analytics, whatever wizardry the lawyers pay for.”
Lawyers. The syllables scrape.
“So it doesn’t record on-site?” I ask. “Like, no local drive you can pull?”
“Nope,” he says. “It’s all off-site now. Cloud this, cloud that. We can check if a unit’s up, down, last time it phoned home.” He pats the tablet holstered at his hip. “But if you want footage, you’ve got to go through channels.”
“What kind of channels?” Tessa asks lightly. “Asking for a friend who hates bureaucracy.”
He snorts. “State DOT, usually. Or whoever’s got the contract on that segment. Guardrail company’s lawyers sometimes file holds after a crash if they smell a lawsuit. Then Vantage flags the drives, makes sure nothing gets overwritten.”
“Holds,” I repeat. My mouth tastes like tin. “For how long?”
“Depends on the case.” He looks at me more closely now. “You got an attorney?”
I picture Jonah’s NDA, Liam’s quiet meetings, Evelyn’s pristine suits. “Not one I trust,” I say.
His gaze softens a fraction. “Official line? You want anything from this camera, you go through DOT. Unofficial?” He lowers his voice. “If this is what I think it is, that footage is locked down so tight it squeaks. Ask too many questions, and you’ll get ten different versions of ‘no record exists.’”
My pulse steadies into a hard, flat line. Locked down means someone noticed value. Or liability.
“Thank you for checking on us,” Tessa says, touching his arm lightly in a gesture I’ve watched her use on frightened patients. “We’ll get out of your hair.”
He nods, stepping back toward his truck. “You sure you’re safe to drive?”
“We’re good,” she says. “We live close.”
“All right then.” He tips his cap toward me. “Ma’am.”
I watch him climb into the truck, the amber beacon flashing again as he rolls forward and parks closer to the access ladder. When he’s focused on his tablet, we hurry back to my car, gravel skittering under our feet.
Inside, I slam the door and pull the lock with a clack that feels too loud.
“You got it?” Tessa asks, breath puffing.
I wake my phone. The last photo fills the screen: the sticker, sharp and legible. VANTAGE DATA SOLUTIONS. The logo’s eye glares back from under my fingerprint smudges.
“Yeah,” I say. “I got it.”
Micro-hook: if the road has a memory, it’s been outsourced.
We don’t talk much on the drive back to Maple Hollow. The wipers thud across the windshield, pushing fine mist aside in tired arcs. Headlights from opposing traffic smear across the glass, stretching and breaking around micro-scratches like the world outside is being run through a filter.
Our cul-de-sac glows quiet when I turn in. Porch lights burn on a few houses, tidy rectangles of curated domesticity. The HOA group chat will be busy later, trading complaints about trashcans and rumors about who’s still drinking too much after their kid’s angelversary.
I pull into my driveway. Across the street, Liam’s house sits dark, blinds down. For once, I’m relieved not to see his monitors lit.
“You want me to stay?” Tessa asks as we step out. The air smells like damp lawns and distant freeway, the Maple Hollow signature. “Or do you need alone time with your conspiracy chart?”
“I need you tomorrow,” I say. “If I’m still up untangling corporate shells at two a.m., you’ll find out when you wake up to a 3,000-word text.”
“Terrifying,” she says. She squeezes my shoulder. “Text if his lights come on. Or if you decide to storm his house with a pitchfork.”
“I’m fresh out of pitchforks,” I say. “But thanks.”
Inside, my house wraps around me in its familiar clutter. The faint smell of old coffee and printer paper greets me. I drop my bag on the dining table, clear a space between manuscript pages and bills, and open my laptop.
I pull up the photo again and type the name into a search bar.
VANTAGE DATA SOLUTIONS.
The company website loads slick and friendly: stock photos of highways at sunset, icons promising “Intelligent Roadway Insights,” “Risk Mitigation,” “Evidence-Ready Data.” A carousel at the bottom lists “Strategic Partners & Counsel.” Third from the left: HART RISK SOLUTIONS, PLLC.
My stomach rolls.
I click. The blurb is bland: “Hart Risk Solutions provides specialized legal guidance on transportation liability, ensuring our mutual clients meet regulatory standards and defend against unfounded claims.” The words might as well be printed on a shield.
I lean back, the chair creaking. Hart Risk Solutions. Evelyn Hart’s firm. The same name glowing on Liam’s monitor the morning I followed him downtown. The same logo stamped under his careful hands.
I open another tab, searching his name and the company together. An old press release pops up, tucked away on a business wire site: “Private Intelligence Consultant Liam Rowe Partners with Hart Risk Solutions on Data Integrity Review.” Corporate boilerplate fills the rest, but the header hits hard.
Of course his client list includes the people holding the key to this camera.
I scroll back to the Vantage site, fingers tight on the trackpad. Buried in the footer, in smaller font, is a line about “litigation support services coordinated through outside counsel.” The contact email for “legal inquiries” belongs not to Vantage, but to a HartRisk domain.
Grim vindication settles into my bones. I was right: the curve had a witness, and the guardrail company’s lawyers—or their proxies—got to it first.
The question is whether they buried what it saw, or clipped it into something they can use to bury me.
I drag the photo of the sticker into a new folder on my desktop and label it OLD WILLOW – EYES. Then I sit in the dim light of my dining room, watching my reflection ghost over the laptop screen, and think about who else might be watching this tiny movement—the spin of a cursor, the opening of a file.
The road remembers. The camera remembers. And now I know exactly whose servers I’ll have to pry open to get those memories back.