The bright smear of headlights at the edge of the dashcam frame swells until it fills the glass.
I dig my fingers into the arms of the chair, nails scraping fabric. The wipers keep up their steady thump, dragging arcs through rain on the windshield, refusing to speed up. Liam’s car hums low under it all, engine a dull, steady presence that feels too calm for what I know is coming.
“This is before the curve,” I whisper. “We’re still on the main stretch.”
“Yeah,” Liam says beside me. His voice is flat, but his knee bounces, jittering the whole chair. “Wait for the next marker.”
The road ahead bends gently. Reflective posts blink past at the edges of the frame. On the shoulder, a patch of gravel opens like a lay-by carved into the dark. My son’s car rolls forward in that narrow tunnel of light, taillights glowing a deep, steady red. I recognize the pattern of the bumper stickers even in the grain: band logos, a faded national park, the crooked corner of the student parking permit he never peeled off.
My breathing goes shallow. My ribs tighten around my lungs.
Caleb’s brake lights flare brighter, then stay on. His car drifts toward the shoulder, blinker ticking an orange pulse.
“He pulls over,” I say. “He actually pulls over.”
“Yeah,” Liam answers quietly. “He does.”
The dashcam records every inch of distance like a jury. Gravel spits under Caleb’s tires as he settles onto the shoulder, hazard lights popping on. Amber flashes strobe against wet guardrail and low embankment. The world beyond his car is a blur of black trees and the ghostly curve sign I have stared at in daylight visits to the crash site.
Liam eases his own car down in speed. In the audio, I hear the faint squeak of his shoe on the pedal, the breath he drags in.
“This is where… in EMDR…” My tongue sticks to my teeth. “This is where I started seeing things.”
“This is where you remembered,” he says. “There’s a difference.”
On-screen, both of Caleb’s front doors swing open.
The interior light flares white for a moment, blowing out detail, but I know that shape falling out of the driver’s seat. Shoulders hunched, hoodie up against the rain, a familiar slouch carved into his walk. He steps into the hazard-stuttered light and his image distorts across the dashcam glass, part reflection, part reality, two versions stitched together by the lens.
The passenger side opens too. Another figure climbs out.
Me.
Micro-hook: My knees go weak even though I’m already sitting. I can’t hold both versions of me at once—the one on the screen and the one gripping this chair—without feeling my skull strain.
“Pause,” I rasp.
Liam doesn’t. “We said no pausing.”
“Then rewind,” I shoot back, throat burning. “I need to see that again.”
“One pass,” he says, fingernails white on the mouse. “You asked for the unedited cut. You get it in sequence, no looping. That was the deal.”
“I didn’t sign a contract,” I say, but I don’t reach for the controls. I can’t pry my fingers off the chair to do it. “Fine. Then don’t rewind. Let me… just…”
I lean closer until the pixels blur.
The camera’s mic picks up muffled voices, warped by distance and rain and glass. Caleb turns toward my side of the car. His mouth moves. At first it’s just shape, no sound my brain can attach language to.
Then the audio gains him.
“…done ruining things,” he says, exactly like the memory that sliced me open on Dr. Navarro’s couch. “You drive.”
The words punch through the little office like the crash itself.
I jerk back, one hand flying to my sternum. The version in my EMDR session was close enough to this that my spine recognizes it—the cadence, the roughness, the slur of tiredness or alcohol—but here the words are trapped in digital lungs. They live outside me. Not planted by suggestion. Not dreamed.
“You hear that?” I whisper. “Say you hear that.”
Liam’s throat works. “I hear it,” he says. “Mara, I told you—”
“He handed me the keys,” I say. My voice shakes around the sentence like it’s too heavy. “He tried.”
On-screen, Caleb steps closer to the passenger side—my side. His arm lifts, hand extended, something small and metallic glinting between his fingers. My figure moves toward him, out of the frame of the open door. We overlap in the camera’s view, two silhouettes merging for a moment in the smear of light on wet glass.
I can’t see my face. Only the tilt of my head, the way my shoulders pull in against the cold. But I know from the angle that I’m looking up at him. He’s taller than me by more than a head, even there on the shoulder in the rain.
I watch my own hand reach out and curl around his.
The keys pass between us.
“That’s…” My teeth click shut on the end of the sentence and I have to open my jaw again. “That’s real. That’s the part I kept thinking was metaphor. Like my brain gave me a little art film about guilt.”
“Brains don’t waste energy filming metaphors,” Liam says. “They just misfile the reel.”
I want to hit him for turning this into a neat line. I want to thank him for saying it out loud so I don’t drown in the idea that all of this has been my private fable. Instead, I grip the chair until my knuckles look bleached.
In the video, we separate again. Caleb turns toward the passenger side, shoulders rounding forward. I move toward the driver’s door. The camera catches the way my steps hesitate, the micro-stutter before commitment.
“Get back in the car,” past-Liam mutters on the audio. His voice is strained, words punched through clenched teeth. “Come on, don’t swap, just stay put and let me see what…”
His voice trails into a hissed curse. His headlights cut the scene into hard lines: my body framed by the open driver’s door, Caleb half-turned, the guardrail a silver scar just beyond.
Then the second engine enters.
I hear it before I see it—lower than Liam’s, louder, a growl rising into a snarl. Somewhere on the audio, a faint Doppler streak of distant freeway noise adds a ghost chorus, but this new sound is nearer, sharper, eating pavement. The dashcam’s rear section catches a flare of light in the top corner, bouncing off the inside of Liam’s windshield, a reflection overlaid on the already reflected scene.
“What’s that?” I whisper. “That’s not you.”
“No,” he says. The word comes out rough. “That’s the other car.”
Headlights surge in the rearview mirror band at the top of the screen, swallowing the small rectangle of road behind Liam. The glass fills with white. For a second, the entire image is nothing but light layered on light—his forward beams on the shoulder, the hazard flashes, the new glare from behind.
The car’s engine note climbs, a rising wail. Whoever is driving isn’t easing off. I can tell even from the audio. No lift, no brake squeal, no polite drop in speed for a stranded vehicle. Just acceleration.
“Were your hazards on?” I ask through my teeth.
“Yeah,” he says. “So were his. Caleb’s. That’s why the reflection flickers like that.”
“So they saw,” I say. “They knew we were stopped.”
Liam doesn’t answer. His jaw just flexes once, hard.
In the frame, he nudges his own car a little to the left, positioning in the lane. The dashcam shivers. His hands must be tense on the wheel; I see them in the faint interior overlay, knuckles pale.
“You thought they were going to hit us,” I say.
“I thought they were going to blow right past all three of us,” he says. “I didn’t know which outcome scared me more.”
The unknown car fills the rear reflection like a sun in reverse. The camera can’t pick up its color, just the harsh geometry of light, but when it edges into the lane beside Liam’s sedan to pass, the angle shifts enough that I catch a distorted glimpse of form—hoodline, mirror, the squared-off shape of a logo badge on the grille, warped by glass.
Micro-hook: For a heartbeat, a sliver of the front plate flashes in the windshield reflection, characters warped: a number, two letters. Not enough yet, but a thread.
“There,” I hiss, stabbing a finger toward the screen. “You see that? The plate—”
“Later,” Liam cuts in. His voice has gone clipped and professional, the tone I heard when he walked me through crash-test data. “Focus on the sequence right now. We can scrub for plate detail afterward.”
“Sequence,” I echo, throat raw. “Right.”
The passing car surges ahead, engine roaring loud in the mic. Water sprays up in its wake, droplets streaking sideways across Liam’s windshield. The guardrail on the right flickers in and out of the beams like film strip frames.
Up ahead, my son’s car sits frozen on the shoulder, hazard lights still pulsing. My own small form stands by the open driver’s door, one hand on the roof, body half-turned toward Caleb as if I’m saying something. Maybe I’m telling him to buckle up. Maybe I’m cracking a joke to cut the tension. The camera doesn’t gift me the audio for that. The night swallowed my words.
The second car swerves slightly toward the shoulder.
“No,” past-Liam snarls on the recording. The word rips out of him. “No, no, no—”
Present-Liam flinches in his chair, shoulders lifting, muscles remembering the jolt.
On-screen, the dashcam image lurches. He yanks the wheel. The view swings left, off the lane, off Caleb’s car, off everything. The guardrail leaps across the frame, a silver scar turned vertical. Headlights carve wild shapes into wet pavement. My stomach flips along with the camera.
In the chaos of movement, sound takes over.
The other engine roars louder, then cuts into a heavy, gut-deep crunch—a noise that doesn’t match a single impact. It’s layered. A metal-on-metal slam, the shattering scream of glass, a high, ugly ping of something smaller snapping. Underneath all of it, the low rip of steel biting into something that wasn’t designed to bend.
I know that sound. I heard it from the wrong side of memory, my brain trying to turn it into thunder or a dropped bookshelf. Hearing it this clearly makes my whole body tighten, muscles knotting under my skin.
“That’s not just a guardrail,” I whisper. “That’s… another car hitting us.”
Liam’s past voice yells on the recording, a ragged burst. “Jesus—brake, brake—”
His sedan slams over the fog line. The dashcam catches an instant of grass, ditch, clawed mud. He rides the edge of losing control and claws it back. The harness rustles on audio as he throws his weight against the seat, fighting the skid.
“You nearly hit the rail too,” I say.
“I was trying not to hit you,” he says.
I press my palm over my mouth.
The dashcam reels for a long second, then steadies. When the image clears, we’re through the worst of the swerve. The camera points slightly off-center now, shaken out of perfect alignment. Up ahead, there’s smoke or steam or both, white haze curling under the guardrail where Caleb’s car used to be. The hazard flashes have vanished.
For a moment, there’s no sound but wipers and a high, glitchy whine in the audio feed. Then the mic catches something distant—my scream, raw and wordless, cutting across the asphalt from off-camera.
Present-me bites down on the inside of my cheek so hard I taste iron.
“I thought I was the passenger,” I say. “For months. I thought I grabbed the wheel. I thought I caused…”
“You were outside the car when the hit happened,” Liam says. His eyes stay on the screen, but his hand creeps closer to the armrest near mine, like a magnet pulled and held back. “You didn’t touch the steering wheel that night. Not when the crash happened.”
“I was about to,” I say. “He asked me to. I said yes. I walked around to that side.” My throat works. “My choice. His choice. And then this car…”
I let my hand drop from my mouth and point at the reflection of the second vehicle, now shrinking in the distance in the rear band of the screen. The driver never stops. No brake lights. No flashers. They roar away toward the curve, past the mess they made, leaving the wreck and the guardrail and me on the side of the road with a story I couldn’t put back together.
“That’s not drunk luck,” I say softly. “That’s contact.”
“That’s rear impact,” Liam says. “Exactly where Dana’s report found it.”
The wipers keep sweeping. The timestamp in the corner ticks onward, clinically indifferent. In Maple Hollow, on the night this footage recorded, fog clung low over the slope and parents scrolled their feeds in warm houses, tapping heart reactions on angelversary posts and ignoring the distant sirens. In this frame, under this lens, the curated narratives crack.
I sit back, spine pressed into the chair, every muscle trembling with a tired that lives beneath bone. My gaze stays locked on the frozen image of that fleeting license plate smear in the glass.
“We can sharpen that,” I say. My voice sounds flat, scraped out. “Zoom into the reflection. Enhance the characters. There’s enough data there to pull something.”
Liam finally looks away from the screen and at me. His eyes are bloodshot, pupils huge in the monitor glow. “Yeah,” he says. “With the right software and the right people, we can.”
“Then we find them,” I say. “We find the car. We find whoever decided that night that our lives were worth shaving a few seconds off their drive.”
Micro-hook: The footage keeps playing, wipers sweeping, my recorded scream echoing in a loop inside my skull even after the audio moves on. I stare at the shrinking lights of the fleeing car and realize that for the first time since Caleb died, I’m not asking whether I invented the monster.
I’m asking how fast I can name it before it edits the rest of this story too.