The second morning in Liam’s house stretches thin and shapeless, like the fog pressed against his windows.
Tessa leaves for the hospital before sunrise, shoes squeaking softly on his polished floor, travel mug clinking on the counter. After the front door shuts and the locks hum back into place, the house settles into a quiet full of machines: HVAC sighing, fridge humming, the faint, insect-like whir of whatever server rack he’s hidden in the walls.
I nurse a mug of coffee at his kitchen island and scroll my phone with my thumb on autopilot, skimming outrage and sympathy and troll residue until the words blur. Parents in Maple Hollow are already posting sunrise shots with verse captions and “#blessed” tags while their kids plan reservoir runs in group chats. Headlights smear across the big front window as commuters roll past, glass tinting their light into something distant, abstract.
Boredom isn’t something I remember feeling since Caleb died. My brain usually runs on terror and theory. Here, under Liam’s security grid, the terror has nowhere to sprint. It paces instead.
I rinse out my mug, leave it too carefully in his drying rack, and wander.
His office draws me like a magnet—back of the house, one step down, door mostly open. The air inside is cooler, tinged with dust, plastic, and coffee that’s gone bitter in forgotten cups. The hum is louder in here, layered: fans, drives, the quiet tick of a wall clock counting out seconds I should be using for something productive.
The monitor wall dominates one side of the room, six screens tiled in a grid, each split further into camera feeds. Maple Hollow unfurls in boxes: my charred porch, his driveway, the cul-de-sac from three angles, the side gate, the rear alley. In one frame, fog rides low over the slope, headlights smearing into white ribbons, each car no more than a ghost sliding past.
I stand there, arms wrapped around myself, watching the neighborhood watch me back.
“You know,” I say to the empty room, “if the HOA saw this, they’d ask you to log lawn violations.”
Silence answers. Liam’s swivel chair sits empty, pushed back from the desk at an angle. A hoodie hangs off its back like he evaporated mid-thought.
Bored restlessness claws up my spine. I move closer, the carpet soft under my bare feet, and touch the edge of his desk. The wood is smooth, faintly warm from electronics radiating beneath. A half-empty mug leaves a coffee ring on a legal pad scrawled with tiny block letters and numbers, his handwriting more cipher than script.
The mouse wakes the center monitor with a tiny shake. Menus flicker, overlays blooming over video. Rows of icons line the top: LIVE, REVIEW, ARCHIVE, ADMIN. A different, smaller window sits minimized in the corner, labeled with an innocuous “Sync.”
“You leave your system unlocked?” I murmur. “For a paranoia specialist, that feels off-brand.”
My fingers hover over the mouse. This is his space. His work. His secrets. Ruiz told me last night there are panic buttons in the hall, a safe room behind one of these walls. Liam probably has protocols for guests, and none of them include me free-diving into his files.
Then I think of my porch, blackened. The note under the rock. My medical history splashed in comment sections. Every time I’ve been watched without my input.
“I’m tired of being the only open book,” I say, and click.
The REVIEW menu expands into a calendar, dates highlighted in different colors. Red for alerts, orange for motion-heavy days, blue for nothing but squirrels. I scroll through months, watch the red dots line up: the night of the second crash, the night of my memorial, the night of the fire.
Micro-hook: My thumb hesitates over the month of the crash itself, a black hole on any calendar in my house.
I click anyway.
The date pops open, times listed in twenty-four-hour format. Some show thumbnails—a sliver of my roofline, a passing car, a blur of leaves in wind. At the bottom, grayed out but still there, sits a tiny cloud icon with the word REMOTE beside it.
I click that.
A password box appears, overlaid with the warning: OFF-SITE STORAGE – ADMIN ACCESS ONLY.
My chest tightens. Off-site. Backups that survive when local drives are “compromised,” like those anonymous posts threatened to do to mine. Liam would never trust a single physical piece of hardware, not after what happened to his last big story.
I try the most obvious choice first: his last name.
ACCESS DENIED.
I try the name of his sister. I know it from that one night on the porch, from words he dropped like stones into the dark. My fingers type it gently, half apology, half accusation.
ACCESS DENIED.
“You don’t get to use her for locks,” I mutter. “You already gave her to your ghosts.”
I stare at the blinking cursor. If I were writing this, what password would I give him? He trusts patterns more than people. Dates. Cases. Acronyms. The systems that failed him.
“Or,” I say under my breath, “you reuse.”
Years ago, drunk on a book tour stop in Seattle, he’d admitted to an audience that he always used the same core word in his passwords because “journalists are lazy until they’re obsessed.” The crowd laughed. I’d watched the clip three times while researching him.
I try the title of his biggest buried exposé, the crash-test article that ruined his career.
ACCESS GRANTED – LIMITED blinks back at me.
A soft chime pings in the room, mechanical, almost polite. The progress bar fills, then resolves into a directory tree. At the top: ROWEPLEX_OFFSITE. Under that: folders by year, then by month, then by date. The interface strips the nights down to numbers: 2019-03-17, 2020-08-02, 2021-11-14.
My vision snags on 2021-11-14. The date wraps around my brain like barbed wire. The night of the crash.
My cursor hovers over it. I hear my own breath in this room full of machines.
Behind me, floorboards creak.
“Don’t,” Liam says.
His voice hits the back of my neck before he reaches the doorway. I flinch, guilt flaring, then stiffen my spine.
“You leave your secrets sitting next to the coffee?” I ask, not turning. “That’s entrapment.”
He steps into the room, footsteps quiet, but I can feel the shift in the air. The smell of his soap mixes with the electronic heat. “Mara, I’m not kidding. Back out. Right now.”
I swivel in his chair to face him. He stands with his arms folded, T-shirt rumpled, dark stubble roughening his jaw. The light from the monitors cuts across his face, flattening the color from his eyes.
“Off-site backups,” I say. “Password-locked, but not well enough.”
His gaze slides past me to the screen. When he sees the highlighted date, his expression changes. Not surprise. Confirmation.
“You knew Ruiz would eventually ask,” I say. “About that directory.”
“Ruiz already knows I have remote storage,” he answers. “He doesn’t know you’re in it right now.”
“So call him,” I say. My heartbeat thuds against the bones of my throat. “Tell him you walked in and found me committing menu trespass. He can arrest me after we watch.”
“No.” The word is sharp, too sharp. “You don’t understand what’s in there.”
“Try me,” I say. “My son died on that date. You were behind him. What exactly about that is unknown territory for me?”
He runs a hand through his hair, fingers tangling. “This isn’t about territory. It’s about damage control.”
“That’s your favorite phrase,” I say. “For everyone but yourself.”
For a moment we just stare at each other, two people who have already broken every boundary and are now arguing about a new line in the sand.
He drops his hand. “Those files are encrypted twice,” he says. “Once at the drive level, once per file. They’re raw. No redactions. No stabilization. Audio intact. You think you’re ready to rewatch that night in first-person, full speed, no cutaways?”
My fingers start to tingle. I curl them into fists. “I’m tired of watching edited versions,” I say. “Yours. The cops’. My own brain’s. I want the one thing in this entire mess that hasn’t been massaged by somebody’s agenda.”
His mouth pulls tight. “My agenda when I hit record was proof, not mercy.”
“Good,” I say. “Mercy has not been working out for us.”
He lets out a low, rough exhale and looks away, toward the fog-dulled window set high on the wall. Outside, the cul-de-sac slopes down, invisible from here, headlights smearing across my old house’s glass like distant smudges. For all his cameras, there are angles he can’t see.
“If I say no,” he asks quietly, “do you stop?”
“No,” I answer. “I’ll keep guessing passwords until I lock your system and then we both lose.”
His gaze snaps back to mine, caught between anger and recognition. This is the part of me he used for his investigation: the refusal to let go. It’s also the part that wrecked us.
“You are a nightmare,” he says.
“You moved in across from me,” I say. “You can’t be that surprised.”
Something flickers in his eyes, something tired and fond and furious. He steps around me and drops into the chair, knees bumping mine. His hands reach for the keyboard, fingers hovering above the keys like he’s considering withdrawal one last time.
“You watch once,” he says. “No pausing, no rewinding to punish yourself. Then you walk away for at least an hour. Non-negotiable.”
“You going to sedate me?” I ask.
“I’m going to shut the monitors off if you break that rule,” he answers. “Trust me to do at least that much right.”
I don’t say that trusting him is the opposite of what my skin wants to do. Instead, I nod.
He types a different passphrase this time, longer, his fingers moving fast. I don’t try to read it. The system chews on it for a moment, then opens the 2021-11-14 folder. Inside are multiple files: timestamps forming a ladder up the night.
One stands out. CAM_DASH_ROWEX_20211114_2143Z.enc
“Z-time,” I say. “You really went full Fed.”
“Standardizing time stamps avoids confusion,” he mutters. “Especially when people try to use ambiguity to bury things.”
His mouse hovers over the file. He doesn’t double-click yet. “Last chance,” he says. “You can turn around, go back upstairs, keep the version in your head. No one will force you to swap it.”
“That version already betrayed me,” I say. “I need to see what it’s been hiding.”
Micro-hook: He looks at me then with something raw, like he’s watching a building he designed walk into its own demolition.
He clicks.
A decryption progress bar appears: UNLOCKING HEADER… 12%… 47%… 100%. The drive whirs audibly under the desk, a faint vibration through my shins. Then the screen goes black, except for a timestamp in the upper corner and a tiny white label: ROWEX CAM – FRONT DASH.
The image fades in.
Night. The world rendered in grainy grayscale and washed-out color, the way cheap dashcams flatten reality. Headlights stretch forward into twin tunnels on wet asphalt, rain dots streaking the glass. The wipers thump in a steady rhythm, an extra heartbeat.
In the distance, another pair of taillights glows red. Caleb’s car. Familiar, even from behind—the shape, the height off the ground, the little dent in the rear bumper his insurance never fixed. The camera catches it all, this moving rectangle of my child’s last commute, framed by Liam’s windshield glass.
My lungs forget their job. I lean forward without meaning to, knuckles whitening on the edge of the desk.
“That’s… that’s him,” I whisper, like there’s any doubt.
On the audio, low under the engine hum and tire hiss, I hear Liam’s voice from that night. Not the smug, calculated tone he uses in meetings, but something tenser, clipped.
“Come on, kid,” past-Liam murmurs. “Don’t speed up. Just hold steady. Let me see what you do.”
Present-Liam flinches beside me.
“You were talking to him,” I say. “Like he could hear you.”
“I talk to everyone I tail,” he answers hoarsely. “Keeps me from narrating in my head.”
The dashcam view follows Caleb’s car as it rounds a bend, Maple Hollow’s reflected freeway halo faint on the low clouds. Signs flash past: speed limit, curve warning, the blank backsides of billboards. Glass reflections ghost faint interior details over the road—Liam’s hands on the wheel, the outline of the dash, a small swinging keychain near the mirror.
The timestamp ticks closer to the window Ruiz always talked around. My heart beats in time with the wipers.
“How far back were you?” I ask.
“Far enough not to get his plate on a casual glance,” he says. “Close enough not to lose him if he took a surprise turn.” His jaw clenches. “Too close for plausible deniability, not close enough to do what I told myself I was doing.”
In the video, Caleb’s brake lights flare brighter for a second—testing, maybe, or reacting to something ahead I can’t see yet. Liam’s headlights wash over the wet road as his sedan adjusts speed to match.
The sign for OLD WILLOW RD NEXT RIGHT looms up at the edge of the frame, reflective paint catching the light and flaring white.
My hand flies to my mouth. “There,” I choke. “That’s it. That’s…”
The road curves, camera following. The off-ramp’s guardrail flashes into view ahead, still intact in this frame, a continuous silver line waiting like a blade. The audio catches the soft click of a turn signal and the faint, faster rhythm of Liam’s breathing.
The car ahead—my son’s car—signals too, moves into the right lane. Its taillights blur in the rain, two pulsing red orbs disappearing and reappearing through the wiper arcs. The timestamp stamps every second into digital stone.
On the audio, past-Liam’s voice drops to a whisper. “Show me why,” he says. “Show me what they did.”
My whole body leans closer, down into the frame, toward the looming curve and the guardrail and whatever waits just beyond the limit of the dashcam’s reach.
The footage plays on, carrying us toward the moment my memory fractures, toward whatever this camera caught and my brain rewrote, and I feel my stomach drop as the bright white of an approaching pair of headlights blooms at the edge of the screen.