I text Tessa one sentence: Come over. I need you to see something.
She answers with a thumbs-up emoji and Ten minutes.
Ten minutes is enough time to print the frames again, to lay them out on the dining table under the crooked overhead light: Caleb’s hatchback at the gas station, the dark sedan three minutes behind, the traffic cam shot near Old Willow Road with the sedan creeping through the intersection. The printer leaves the paper warm and faintly chemical between my fingers. I smooth each page, aligning corners, arranging them like tarot cards I already know the meaning of.
Through the front window, Maple Hollow’s slope holds a low curtain of fog. Headlights push through it and smear across the glass, turning every passing SUV into a luminous ghost. Somewhere up the hill, a dog barks, then goes quiet. The mechanical chime of a phone alert beeps from my kitchen counter; neighborhood Facebook thread, probably, or another memorial hashtag with wings and clouds and “fly high.”
The doorbell rings.
I let Tessa in and get a wet slap of pine and hospital sanitizer off her scrubs. Her hair is twisted into a messy knot; a crease from her N95 mask still dents the bridge of her nose. She toes off her sneakers, leaving damp prints on the entry tile, and gives me a tired once-over.
“You look like you’ve been up all night making a murder board,” she says. “Make it quick, I’m on a double tomorrow.”
“Not a murder board,” I say. “A… story problem.”
Her gaze snaps to my face. “That tone makes my stomach hurt,” she says. “What did you do?”
“Just come here.”
I lead her into the dining room. The photos wait in neat rows on the table, white against the scarred wood. Caleb’s car, the sedan, the intersection. Glass and light, captured and flattened.
Tessa stops dead.
“What am I looking at?” she asks.
“Gas station camera,” I say, touching the first page. “Traffic cam. This is the road from the party to Old Willow. This is Caleb at one-oh-six at the light.” I slide my finger to the next sheet. “This is him passing the station at one-oh-seven. And this—” I tap the sedan “—is three minutes behind him. Same direction. Same lane.”
Her throat moves. She steps closer until her hip bumps the table.
“And?” she says, but her voice has gone thin.
“And there was a kid at the party who remembers an older man in a dark car idling down the road,” I say. “Backing into the shadows. Pulling out after Caleb.”
She presses her tongue into her cheek, a habit she picked up in triage to hide reactions from patients. It doesn’t work on me.
“You’re sure that’s his car?” she asks.
“I counted the scratches,” I say. “What I’m not sure about is the sedan. I thought you might be able to help with that part.”
Micro-hook: Tessa reaches toward the traffic cam frame, then snatches her hand back like the ink might burn her.
“Why would I know that car?” she asks.
“Because you were there,” I say. “At the party. In the driveway. You watched him leave.”
Her eyes flick up to mine, wide and dark. For a second, I see her at seventeen again, lip ring and half-shaved head, cornered in Mom’s kitchen when I confronted her about covering for Caleb sneaking out.
“Are you accusing me of… what, exactly?” she whispers.
“I’m accusing you of maybe knowing more than you told me,” I say. “What did you see on that road, Tess?”
Her lips part, but no sound comes out. She grips the back of a dining chair hard enough that the wood creaks. Color drains from her face.
“Hey,” I say, softer. “Sit down.”
She shakes her head once, a sharp little denial, then collapses into the chair like her knees stopped working. Her hands find the edge of the table; her scrubs brush the floor. The smell of hospital soap spikes in the air between us.
“I need you to be really careful here, Mar,” she says. “You’re stitching things together from bad footage and what, drunk teenagers?”
“And you,” I say.
The words hang there.
She inhales on a wet sound, somewhere between a gasp and a swallowed sob. Her gaze drops to the sedan photo. One of her fingers extends, hesitant, and lands on the blurred hood.
“I told you I walked him out,” she says. “I told you we argued. That we negotiated, and I let him go when he swore he’d text me when he got home.”
“You never mentioned another car,” I say.
Her shoulders jerk. Her next breath comes in short fragments.
“I didn’t remember it at first,” she says. “Or I did and I filed it under not important because… God, I don’t know, because of course there are cars on that road Friday night? Do you know how much adrenaline I was riding in that driveway? Do you know how many drunk kids I was juggling?”
“Try,” I say. “Try to remember.”
I slide into the chair opposite her, my knees knocking the table, and angle the gas station shot so it faces her. The pixels of the sedan look smug in their anonymity.
She stares at it. Her hand comes up to press against her mouth, knuckles blanching. Her eyes gloss over, filling faster than she can blink them clear. A tear spills onto her thumb, then another, pattering on the photo.
“Fuck,” she whispers, the word shredding. “Fuck, Mara.”
“What?” My heart slams into my ribs. “What did you see?”
She shakes her head, but her fingers curl on the paper, crumpling the corner.
“You’re not wrong,” she says finally, voice raw. “There was a car. I thought it was you.”
The room tilts for a second. I grip the underside of my chair.
“Start at the beginning,” I say. My voice sounds like Liam’s in the mock deposition, and I hate that I know that, but I don’t stop. “You walked him out. Then what?”
She sucks in air on a jagged inhale, wipes her nose on the back of her hand, and forces the words out.
“He was pissed at me for texting you,” she says. “He kept saying, ‘You’re not my mom, stop making me into a patient,’ that kind of thing. I told him I would call a ride if he didn’t cut the macho bullshit. He said he’d been there for hours, that he’d sobered up, that he needed his car for his weekend shift. You know the script.”
I nod, jaw clenched.
“We were in the driveway,” she says. “The air was cold enough that you could see our breath, and there was this group of kids by the garage vaping and pretending they were invisible. Music leaking from the basement. Phones lighting up everywhere. Then his phone buzzed.”
“From me,” I say.
“From you,” she confirms. “You’d sent: You home yet? Call me. He stared at it, and I swear his whole face changed. He looked… small.”
My throat tightens. I remember that text now, thumb stabbing at the send button, thinking I was being a responsible parent.
“He said, ‘She’s going to kill me,’” Tessa continues. “I told him, ‘Good, maybe she’ll ground you until you qualify for Medicare.’ He laughed, but it was wrong. Then he said—” Her voice cracks. She swallows. “He said, ‘Maybe it’s good. Maybe she’ll come get me and we can talk when she isn’t making that face.’”
“What face?” I ask, though I know.
“The one where your eyebrows try to climb into your hair,” she says, weakly miming it. “The one from the last time you yelled at him about driving drunk.”
Micro-hook: Tessa grips the photograph so hard that the image buckles, and for a heartbeat I see Caleb standing in that driveway, the glow of his screen painting his features, waiting to be rewritten by whoever shows up.
“I told him to call you,” she says. “He rolled his eyes but he did. It went to voicemail. He didn’t leave a message.”
My brain jerks through its archive of that night. I remember my phone lighting up while I loaded the dishwasher, the missed call icon, my own stupid rationalization that he’d pocket-dialed me and that chasing him would make me look obsessive.
“I texted you again later,” I whisper.
“I know,” she says. “He didn’t show me that one. He shoved the phone back in his pocket and said, ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll drive slow.’ I stood there and did the whole nurse spiel about reaction time and false sobriety and ER clean-ups. He kissed my cheek and said, ‘You worry like Mom. You and Mara should start a club.’”
A shaky half-laugh breaks out of her and dies immediately.
“I told him I would call Jonah,” she says. “He flinched. Then he said, ‘Don’t. I’ll call her. I promise.’”
“So you let him go,” I say.
“I watched him get in the car,” she says. “He backed out of the driveway like an eighty-year-old, and I thought that meant I’d gotten through to him at least a little. He turned toward the main road. His taillights disappeared around the trees.”
She stops. Tears drip off her chin now, landing on her badge.
“And the sedan?” I press.
She squeezes her eyes shut, presses her fingertips into her eyelids hard enough to leave crescents.
“I was still in the driveway,” she says. “I hadn’t gone back inside yet. I was freezing. I kept thinking I should have physically grabbed his keys, that you would have, that I’d be the villain in whatever story you told about the night. Then I heard an engine from down the road.”
The house feels louder now—the fridge hum, the tick of the thermostat, the distant rush of the freeway threading through the rain outside.
“I saw headlights between the trees,” she says. “Pulling out from the side of the road. There’s that little gravel cutout near the bend? Somebody had been parked there, lights off. When Caleb’s taillights hit the corner, this car eased out behind him.”
“What did you think?” I ask.
“I thought it was you,” she whispers. “I thought you’d already driven out here, that he’d called you when he walked away from me. The car was dark and low and… adult. Not some kid’s beat-up Civic. I had this wave of relief hit so hard my knees wobble just remembering it. I told myself, ‘Okay, big sister, you did your job. He’s with his mom now. You don’t have to be the bad cop anymore.’”
She laughs again, a strangled, angry sound.
“I literally turned around and went back into the house because I thought you were there,” she says. “I grabbed someone’s abandoned White Claw and started yelling at a girl for trying to sleep on the bathroom floor, and I felt—” Her voice breaks completely. She covers her face with her hands. “I felt proud.”
Proud. The word hits harder than any accusation.
I sit there, watching my sister fold in on herself, remembering the moment in my kitchen when I saw the missed call and decided not to call back because I didn’t want to be the mother who kept yanking the leash.
Two women, two decisions, one dark sedan sliding into the space we vacated.
I shove my chair back and move around the table. Her shoulders are shaking, her breath hitching between her fingers. I hook my arms around her from the side, pressing my cheek against her temple. Her skin is cold and damp with sweat.
“Hey,” I whisper. “Stop. Don’t do that thing where you take the whole world on.”
“I handed him over,” she sobs. “I literally handed him over in my head. I pictured you in the driver’s seat, you two talking, him rolling his eyes but listening, and I felt so fucking relieved that I didn’t have to make him hate me. And it wasn’t you. It wasn’t you at all.”
“I did the same,” I say. “I saw the missed call and told myself it was nothing, that chasing him would make me the crazy mom again. I thought you were handling it. I felt relieved too.”
She drops her hands and looks at me through blotched eyes, mascara streaked. For a second we just stare at each other, seeing the same sin reflected back—two women who chose the story where someone else handled it.
Micro-hook: I realize there’s no clean villain in this frame that doesn’t have my face and hers ghosted over it, layered under the blur of that sedan.
“Do you think that car’s his?” she whispers, nodding toward the photos. “Liam’s? Or Jonah’s creepy partner, or one of those corporate drones you keep digging up?”
I picture Liam’s silhouette by his sedan, hand braced on the roof, the way it matched the gas station blur just enough to make my heart slip. I picture a subcontractor I haven’t met yet, a nameless man on a payroll line.
“I don’t know,” I say. “That’s the worst part. I can’t tell where my memory ends and my wish for a neat monster begins.”
Tessa leans into me until our foreheads press together. Her breath is hot and sour with coffee and hospital vending machine snacks. My shirt soaks through at the shoulder where her tears land.
“We can’t keep doing this,” she whispers. “Peeling back layers until there’s nothing left but ‘we should have’ and ‘we could have.’ I already live with one version of that night playing in my head at three a.m. I don’t know how many edits I can survive.”
“I don’t either,” I say. “But I also don’t know how to live with not knowing who was in that car.”
We cling to each other in the dim dining room, surrounded by glass and paper and screens, every angle of Caleb’s last hours caught in bad pixels and worse decisions. Outside, a car rolls slowly down the cul-de-sac, headlights gliding along the windows in a spectral sweep. Both of us flinch.
Tessa pulls back first, swiping at her eyes.
“If you show me that footage again,” she says hoarsely, “and give me time, I might be able to tell you more. The way the car idled, the sound of the engine—it’s all buried in there somewhere. I just don’t know yet whether digging it up will help you or just finish wrecking us.”
Her words hang between us like another unsteady frame.
I look at the blurred sedan on the table, at the way our reflections bend across the glass of the dark window beyond, and I know this is the worst part of the story craft I used to love: at some point, I have to decide whose guilt gets written in ink and whose stays in the margins.
I don’t know yet whether I’m ready to find out which page my sister belongs on.