I start with the ugliest place I can think of.
The gas station squats at the edge of the road that leads out toward the reservoir, its fluorescent canopy humming over slick concrete. The air outside carries rain and gasoline and fried food from the attached mini-mart. Headlights crawl past on the slope, smearing white across the glass front doors every few seconds.
I park under a light that makes my blue paint look diseased and sit for a moment, listening to the distant freeway hum under the rain. My fingers drum on the steering wheel, counting off the seconds Ryan mentioned between Caleb’s hatchback and the dark sedan. I picture taillights disappearing into night with a stranger pacing them, my son’s car framed neatly in someone else’s windshield.
Inside, the store smells like burnt coffee and sugar and the metallic tang of coins. A TV over the refrigerated case spits out muted sports highlights. Glass doors for soda coolers line the back wall, each pane reflecting my shape in disjointed fragments.
The clerk at the counter looks sixteen and fifty at the same time—pale, dark circles, a name tag that reads TYLER. He thumbs through his phone with one hand and rings up a pack of gum for a woman in scrubs with the other. When she leaves, the mechanical chime on the door sings its three-note tune and then we are alone.
“Hey,” I say, stepping up to the counter. “Do you have a minute?”
He looks up, startled. “Uh, sure. You want, like, cigarettes or something?”
“Information,” I say. “On your cameras.”
His eyebrow goes up slowly. “We’re out of tinfoil hats,” he says. “Try aisle three.”
That almost pulls a laugh out of me; it comes out thin and wrong. I lean my forearms on the counter, close enough that he can see the faint tremor in my hands.
“I’m not here for a conspiracy,” I say. “I’m here because my kid died.”
His gaze snaps to my face, then skates away. He knows. Of course he knows. Everyone within ten miles knows about “that crash mom.”
“You’re Caleb’s—” He cuts himself off, throat working. “Right. I remember the flowers by Old Willow. My manager said not to talk to reporters.”
“I’m not a reporter,” I say. “I get written about. Different thing.”
He shifts his weight. The phone on the counter lights up with a notification and then goes dark. The hum of the coolers grows louder in the pause.
“Look,” I say, lowering my voice. “The night of the crash, there was a party near the reservoir. Kids ordered pizza; you probably sold them energy drinks and gas. I have reason to think a dark sedan followed my son when he left. Your cameras face the street, right?”
“Yeah, but we only keep footage, like, a month,” he says. “Overwrites on the hard drive. That was… way before.”
My stomach drops. Then I remember the notice taped by the register about “enhanced security and incident review” that went up after a robbery last winter, and I cling to it like a life raft.
“Since the robbery, you upgraded,” I say. “Cloud backup. Longer retention. Right?”
He hesitates, eyes flicking toward a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“Even if we did, I’m not allowed to,” he says. “Manager only. And she’s not here.”
“Can you call her?” I ask. “Tell her there’s a grieving mother and she’s in your store and she is not leaving without at least a no from the horse’s mouth.”
He stares at me. My voice wavers on the last word; I clamp my jaw.
Micro-hook: Tyler glances back at the security monitor above the counter like he’s already imagining how this scene will look on replay later, him caught between company policy and a woman who will not stop.
“She’ll be pissed,” he says.
“So am I,” I say. “You won’t win that contest.”
He exhales through his nose, long and slow, then taps at the landline by the lottery tickets. He turns slightly away, but his voice carries.
“Hey, Jenna, it’s Tyler. Yeah. Um, there’s…” His eyes slide toward me. “Caleb Ellison’s mom is here. She wants to see security footage from the night he crashed. Yeah, that night. No, she’s not media. She’s just… here.”
The pause on the other end stretches. Tyler’s fingers drum the counter. The rain ticks against the glass doors.
“Okay,” he says finally. He hangs up and meets my eyes. “She says we’re not supposed to let anyone back there, but if you take pictures off the screen, that’s on you. And if anyone asks, I thought you were an auditor.”
“An auditor in jeans and a three-day hair emergency,” I say.
“You people are weird,” he mutters. “Come on.”
He badges us through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door into a cramped back office that smells like fryer grease and dust. A metal rack holds boxes of cups and detergent; a desk under the only tiny window supports a wheezing desktop tower and two monitors. One shows a spreadsheet, the other a grid of camera feeds.
Tyler drops into the chair and wakes up the system. Lines of dates and times ripple across the interface.
“You know the night?” he asks.
I tell him. My tongue feels thick around the date.
He scrolls through menus, muttering about archives and remote servers. When the right range loads, the monitor flicks into a time-lapse of people coming and going under the canopy—pickup trucks, compact cars, the glow of taillights in the night.
“This is the pump view,” he says. “I’ll pull up the street one.”
He toggles cameras until a wide shot of the road appears: the station’s sign in the corner, pines looming behind, the two-lane stretch that leads toward Old Willow Road. In the dark, headlights smear into bright lines on the low-resolution footage. A timestamp in the corner blinks like a pulse.
My heart syncs to it.
“We’re at, like, ten p.m.,” Tyler says. “You said he left around one?”
“One-oh-something,” I say. “The kids think. Give or take.”
He sets the playback speed to eight times normal and we watch cars streak past in faint white comets. Minutes compress into seconds. Somewhere in that blur, my son is driving by, alive and singing or silent and scared or steady and focused depending on which teenager I decide to believe.
“There,” I breathe suddenly. “Stop. Back it up.”
Tyler scrubs backward until a small silver shape settles in the frame. The image is grainy but unmistakable to me: the profile of Caleb’s hatchback, the stupid band sticker a pale smudge on the rear window, headlights swinging as he turns toward the main road.
The timestamp reads 1:07 a.m.
My teeth clamp down on my lower lip until I taste iron.
“That’s him?” Tyler asks quietly.
“Yes,” I say. The word barely gets out. “Can you go forward, like, three minutes? Slow.”
He nudges the control. The hatchback moves out of frame. One truck passes the other way; a lone cyclist glitches by in ghostly stutters near the fog line. Rain makes white mist under the streetlights.
At 1:10, a dark shape enters from the left—sleek, low, unremarkable, the kind of car you forget as soon as it passes.
“Pause,” I whisper.
He does. On the screen, the sedan sits mid-frame, frozen between two lanes of glowing pavement. The headlights flare just enough to obscure the plate, but the contours of the hood, the angle of the windshield, the ratio of roof to doors… my brain starts cataloging without permission.
“Can you zoom?” I ask.
“This isn’t CSI,” he says, but he double-clicks and the car fills more of the screen. Each pixel grows fat and blocky, turning the sedan into a mosaic of gray squares. The driver’s side window is a dark patch; behind it, a darker blur that might be a head, shoulders, the hint of a baseball cap brim.
Micro-hook: My finger lifts toward the screen before I even realize I’m doing it, drawn to that blur like it contains Caleb’s last secret or the name of the person who was already rewriting his crash before the guardrail bent.
“Can I record this?” I ask.
“We don’t have export on this plan,” he says.
“I meant with my phone.”
He groans softly. “Yeah, sure. Whatever. Just don’t tag me.”
I raise my phone, trying to hold it steady. The glass surface of the monitor reflects my own face faintly over the sedan; my ghosted mouth hovers above the driver’s side door. I frame the timestamp, the car, the road sign in the distance that confirms we’re on the right stretch.
I hit record and let it run as Tyler plays the sequence twice: Caleb’s car at 1:07, the empty road, then the sedan gliding through at 1:10 in the same direction. A shadow tail.
“You got it?” he asks.
“I got something,” I say. “Thank you.”
At home, the rain intensifies, drumming on the porch roof and turning the yard into a distorted mirror. Maple Hollow’s houses glow up the slope, individual squares of light where parents scroll memorial hashtags and teenagers sneak out their back windows.
I move between my laptop and my phone with mechanical focus. Gas station footage: check. Time: 1:07 and 1:10. Direction: toward Old Willow Road. Next: every camera along that route, public and private, that might have caught that sedan again.
The city’s transportation website is an ugly tangle of menus, but the traffic cams are there, little live thumbnails that refresh every few seconds. A link tucked at the bottom offers “archived imagery for incident review.” I click through, heart ticking.
The interface is clunky, but I know how to scrub a timeline now. I plug in the intersection half a mile from Old Willow—the last place with a mounted camera before the curve dips out of sight—and the date of the crash. The list of captured intervals populates like a long, indifferent shrug.
Midnight. 12:30. 1:00. 1:15.
I start with 1:00, speeding it up. The view is angled high over the intersection: four crosswalks, two turning lanes, a gas station sign in the distance. Headlights sweep through from all directions, white and red smears on wet asphalt. The fog hangs low, making the light halo.
At 1:06, a silver car turns left in the lower corner, small and fast. The quality is worse than the station’s, but I know that shape already. My pulse skips.
“Hi, baby,” I whisper to the pixels. “You really did make it this far.”
I jot the timestamp down next to the previous ones. 1:06 at the light. 1:07 passing the station. The math bends into place in my head; he must have rolled through the turn just on the yellow, then hit the stretch toward the pumps right afterward.
I let the recording run a little longer, breath held.
At 1:09, the frame captures a truck. At 1:10, under the streetlamp, a dark sedan moves into view in the exact same lane Caleb used, slower than the rest. Its headlights are closer together than the truck’s, maybe slightly angled. The hood line matches the blur from the gas station. My notebook fills with frantic shorthand: sedan again? same grille?
I pause the video and hit my keyboard to capture a screenshot. The resulting image is ugly, all noise and glare, but the silhouette of the car is there, sectioned neatly by the faint lines of the crosswalk—one more frame of glass over the story.
The driver is just a smudge behind the windshield.
I print it anyway, the printer whirring and clicking like an old man clearing his throat. The paper comes out warm and damp with ink. I pin it to the corkboard over my dining room table, next to Caleb’s playlist scribbles and my timeline, a new square in my homemade evidence mosaic.
The sedan’s shape tugs at something in me—familiar in a way I don’t want yet.
I don’t need to look far to test the thought.
Night deepens; fog creeps down from the ridge and into the cul-de-sac, hugging the asphalt. Across the way, Liam’s windows burn with their usual cool glow—office monitors cycling through god-knows-what, kitchen under-cabinet lights, the faint blue rectangle of a TV.
His car sits in his driveway, nose angled toward the street. Dark, mid-sized, forgettable on purpose. I have watched it a hundred times through my front window, usually when I’m pretending not to.
I pick up the printed traffic-cam frame and walk to my living room window. The glass is cool under my palm when I rest it against the pane. Outside, the neighborhood is quiet; the HOA-approved lawns are slick and dark, edged with identical solar lights.
I hold the photo up until the printed sedan overlaps Liam’s real one in my line of sight.
For a second, the shapes line up. The angle of the roof, the length of the hood, the way the rear window slants. My breath catches. I blink, and the minor differences bloom—bad camera, fog, a traffic angle turning rectangles into trapezoids. Confirmation becomes a mirage from one step to the next.
Micro-hook: My hand shakes enough that the paper rasps against the glass, and for a heartbeat the printed car, the real car, and my pale reflection blur into one layered image I can’t pull apart again.
The porch light across the street flicks on.
Liam steps out, jacket thrown over a T-shirt, keys in his hand. He walks toward his car, shoulders bowed against the drizzle, head tipped down. In profile, the line of his nose and chin slices against the dim halo of the streetlamp. Dark stubble shadows his jaw; his hair curls damply at the neck.
I lower the photo a fraction and watch him through the bare window, feeling like a creep and a detective and a mother who ran out of pride months ago.
He unlocks the sedan. The dome light pops on, turning his interior into a small stage. He leans in to toss something onto the passenger seat, and for a second his torso fills the driver’s side window, broad and solid. His forearm braces on the roof in a way that matches the blur on the gas station screen too well for comfort.
My chest tightens.
“No,” I whisper to the empty room. “No, no.”
He straightens, closes the door with a muted thud, then just stands there, hand on the roof, scanning the street. His gaze slides past my house, pausing on my dark front porch. Does he feel me watching? Does the back of his neck prickle the way mine does when his monitors blink in my direction?
My phone vibrates on the table behind me, the chime slicing through the stale air of the house. I flinch. The sound reminds me of the gas station door, of traffic alerts, of the mechanical notifications that now puncture every quiet in Maple Hollow.
I tear my eyes away long enough to check the screen.
Liam: Heard you’ve been doing your own recon. Want to compare notes before you chase the wrong ghost?
My thumb hovers over the keyboard, right below the photo of the sedan on the corkboard and the live version of that same car idling in his driveway. I can’t tell whether my brain is matching patterns or inventing them to fit the story I’m scared to live without.
If I pin that driver on him and I’m wrong, I become exactly what Evelyn Hart calls me on TV—a woman so desperate for a villain that she’ll staple any outline over the blur.
If I let it go and I’m right, the man who moved in across from me to “help” has been shadowing my son’s taillights since the night the guardrail folded.
I stare out through the glass at Liam’s silhouetted frame, my phone buzzing in my hand, the printed pixel-car crinkling between my fingers, and I don’t know which possibility terrifies me more—the idea that the man in the dark sedan is Liam, or the idea that he belongs to someone else who hired him first.