I don’t sleep. I just trade one screen for another.
Liam scrubs the dashcam back to the moment the second car looms in the rear band, then freezes the frame right where the plate flickers in the windshield reflection. The office smells like stale coffee and warmed plastic, that baked-dust odor electronics exhale when they’ve been on too long. Outside, Maple Hollow’s fog hangs low over the cul-de-sac, making the occasional passing headlights smear across his office window like someone dragging a wrist through wet paint.
“Okay,” he says, leaning forward. His voice has that clipped, working tone I’ve heard when he’s dissecting documents. “Reflection layer only first.”
I watch him peel my past apart like it’s just another dataset. He opens some forensic software I don’t recognize, all grayscale sliders and intimidating acronyms. With a flick of his wrist, he masks out the main road image until the screen turns into a ghost: only bright, mirrored pieces floating on black.
“That’s… creepy,” I say. My tongue feels thick, but my hands are steady now. Busy. “It looks like you pulled the bones out of it.”
“Just stripping away what we don’t need,” he answers. “The sensor still recorded the photons. We’re just telling it which ones to show us.”
I keep my eyes on the screen, but my shoulders rise toward my ears. “You make manipulation sound noble.”
He pauses, glances at me once, then goes back to work. “I’m talking about pixels. Not people.”
On the monitor, the reflected plate sharpens. The smudge resolves into blocks of light and dark. He zooms in until the image turns into a mosaic, but the characters start to emerge: a seven, a B, something that might be a D or an O, depending on how generous I feel about the noise.
“Seven, B…” I lean in until my breath fogs the glass. “That’s a D. Right there. See that little diagonal?”
“Could be,” he says. He toggles a contrast filter, then an edge detector. The tiny diagonal brightens. “Yeah. I’ll call it a D.”
He types “7BD” into a notes file, then flicks to another frame a few milliseconds later. The reflection shifts a hair; more of the plate peeks out from behind glare. This time I see the Oregon tree faintly in the background, stretched by curvature.
“State plate confirmed,” he murmurs. “Passenger vehicle category.”
“What about the sticker?” I tap the glass just below the plate. “That rectangle with the torn corner.”
He zooms out a touch.
The bumper left of the plate comes into view in the reflection. There, warped by glass and angle, a sticker squats on the chrome: dark block, pale letters. He cycles filters again, very gentle, nothing flashy. Slowly, the letters show up like developing film.
“That’s a logo,” I say. “See that triangle? And the… is that a road stripe?”
“Could be a company mark,” he says. He pushes his chair back, cracks his spine, then leans in again. “Let me see if I can dewarp the perspective.”
He lays a digital grid over the reflection, drags anchor points to match the bumper edge, hits a key. The warped sticker flattens a little, losing some distortion. The letters come more into focus: N W R… then the rest is torn or hidden.
“Northwest something,” I breathe. “Road… repair? Roads?”
Liam makes a low sound in his chest. “Northwest Roadway Services. Or Solutions. Or Systems. I’ve seen a few permutations in contracts.”
My heart thuds hard enough that I feel it in my throat. “Guardrail installs use subcontractors, right? The state contracts the big company, they farm out the grunt work.”
“Usually,” he says. He opens another panel, this one for audio. A jagged waveform sprawls across it. “Let’s see what we can coax out of the sound while we’re here.”
He zooms into the section where the second engine roars up behind us. With frequency filters, he picks apart pieces of the noise, like he’s combing tangles out of hair. Under the rumble, a faint crackle emerges, staccato and clipped.
“Is that… a radio?” I ask. “CB or…?”
“Company band, probably.” He hones in, cutting out the engines. A tinny voice leaks through the speakers, distorted beyond gender. “Listen.”
We both lean in.
“…copy… en route Willow… install…” The words judder in pieces. Then, more clearly: “…N-W-R crew three…”
My fingernails drive crescents into my palms. “Crew three,” I repeat. “Northwest Roadway… something… crew three.”
“We’re not going to get a clean signature,” he says, adjusting a slider to try and isolate it further. The sound disintegrates into digital grit. He curses, then kills the audio. “But we have pattern: Oregon plate starts with 7BD, Northwest Roadway-whatever sticker, crew three on Willow.”
Micro-hook: The picture narrows from a faceless car to a unit, a crew, a company, and I feel the shapeless monster in my head put on a uniform.
“You know someone who can work with that,” I say. “You always do. That’s your whole thing.”
Liam scrubs a hand over his jaw. “It’s not a magic wand. DMV data is locked down harder than it used to be. Especially after that leak in—”
“But you know someone,” I cut in. “Don’t give me a lecture about ethics now.”
He exhales through his nose, a short frustrated gust. “I know someone who used to be the research desk at the paper and now freelances doing deep background for people who pay better than I do. She has access to… things.”
“Call her,” I say. My voice comes out flat, edged. “Or I walk this down to Ruiz with a partial and tell him you’re sitting on the rest.”
He gives me a look, part annoyance, part grudging respect. “You weaponize leverage very quickly when you want something.”
“You taught me,” I say. “Congratulations.”
He reaches for his phone, thumb hovering above a contact. His shoulders tighten in a way I recognize from every call I’ve listened in on. “We’re not just asking her to run a plate. We’re asking her to put her name on something that’s going to piss off state infrastructure and a Fortune 500. That has a body count attached to it already.”
I think of my house, charred porch boards and accelerant smell bleeding into old pine and coffee. Of my address pasted in comment threads, accompanied by laughing emojis. “The body count has a head start.”
He studies my face for a second, then taps the number.
The phone rings on speaker. I hear clicks, the muted hum of distant traffic, someone’s keycard reader beeping. Then a woman’s voice washes into the room, dry and alert.
“Rowe,” she says. “You’re calling me from the murder board again, aren’t you?”
“Not a murder board,” he says. “More like… vehicular manslaughter with corporate sponsorship.”
“Comforting.” Her tone holds a wry twist I like immediately. “Who’s your friend breathing into the mic?”
I pull back, straighten. “Mara Ellison,” I say. “My son died in one of those guardrail crashes you’ve probably seen on local news tabs you scroll past.”
A pause. Papers shuffle on her end.
“I know the name,” she says, softer. “Sorry. I also know you probably don’t want sympathy from a stranger before coffee.”
“I want a license plate,” I say. I flex my fingers out of fists. “We have a partial, make, state, company affiliation, and a timestamp within a minute of my son’s crash. Liam says you can do magic.”
“He oversells,” she says. “But miracles happen where the data is already half-loaded. Give me what you’ve got.”
Liam rattles off the details: Oregon plate starting with 7BD, mid-size dark pickup, Northwest Roadway-something sticker, radio call mentioning ‘N-W-R crew three’ heading to Willow. He gives the approximate time, the road designation, the weather conditions, all the context a former reporter knows how to prep.
“You want the plate or the driver?” she asks.
“Both,” I say. “And any employer ties you can connect. Subcontractor names, contract numbers, whatever floats to the top.”
Another rustle. I picture her tucked into some anonymous office, surrounded by monitors, fingers flying across keys the way Liam’s do on his. Another watcher in a world of glass.
“All right,” she says. “I can work partials by cross-referencing fleet registrations and commercial policies. But if this gets me audited, I’m sending Rowe my therapy bill.”
“Add it to my tab,” Liam says.
She hangs up to work. The moment the line goes dead, silence swells in the office. Even the distant freeway hum beyond the window feels muffled.
“What if she can’t find it?” I ask, staring at the frozen frame of the bumper sticker on the screen. “What if the plate got replaced, or the sticker peeled off, or the company folded, or—”
“Stop,” Liam says quietly. “That’s your novelist brain drafting a dozen ways we lose. Wait for the actual plot.”
“The actual plot put me on the shoulder with my son,” I say. My throat tightens around the last word. “And edited out the second driver for two years.”
He shifts, like he wants to reach for me, then thinks better of it and instead reaches for the mouse. He zooms the image out until I can see the whole reflected bumper again.
“Glass remembers what you didn’t,” he says. “We use that.”
Micro-hook: For all the months I spent watching his windows from across the cul-de-sac, I never imagined I’d be grateful for a lens doing my remembering for me.
While we wait, my phone buzzes on his desk with the mechanical chime of neighborhood alerts. I flip it over. The Maple Hollow Facebook group has a new post: blurry shot of my blackened porch, captioned with a prayer hands emoji and someone asking if the HOA can “do anything about unstable elements on the street.”
I lock the screen so hard the case creaks.
“They’d rather police my lawn than the guy who set the fire,” I mutter.
Outside the office window, someone’s SUV glides by, headlights streaking across the glass. For a second they overlay the dashcam image, present ghosts over past ones. This street worships appearances, but the glass keeps giving them away.
Liam’s phone rings again.
He slaps speaker, and the contact’s voice comes through, a little more wired now.
“Okay,” she says. “Your miracle, with caveats. You owe me good whiskey and a firewall consultation.”
“You found it?” I sit forward so fast my chair wheels squeak. “You have a name?”
“I have a plate,” she says. “Full sequence, matching your partial exactly. Oregon, registered as a commercial vehicle under a corporate policy. Make and model line up with your description.”
Papers whisper. I imagine her scrolling.
“The company is Northwest Roadway Remediation,” she continues. “DBA for a larger umbrella owned by Hart Infrastructure Services.”
My jaw locks so tight I hear my molars grind. Evelyn Hart’s smiling face from the news segment flashes in my mind, all polished empathy and legal armor.
“Hart,” I say. “Of course.”
“Plate belongs to a field foreman,” she adds. “Employee vehicle, not pool. Name is…” She reads it off, vowels landing like hammers. “He’s listed in a couple of bid docs as project lead for rural guardrail upgrades.”
The name hits me with a weird jolt of recognition, like a word I’ve skimmed a hundred times without sounding out. I search my mental filing cabinet. My hand flies to my tote bag on the floor, where I’ve stuffed copies of Dana’s leaked documents.
“Wait,” I say. “Spell that.”
She does.
I yank out a crumpled list from the tote, the installation crew sheet for Old Willow Road’s guardrail from years ago. My finger drags down columns of small-font names and titles.
There he is.
“He’s the foreman,” I say. My voice drops, hoarse. “Lead on the crew that installed Caleb’s guardrail. Same name, same company family.”
Liam exhales a wordless curse.
“So,” the contact says slowly, “your mystery driver is not just some rando who doesn’t know how to merge. He’s directly tied to the hardware your kid died on.”
My vision tightens for a second. I steady myself on the desk.
“Can you get anything on his schedule that night?” Liam asks. “Work orders, inspection logs, anything that shows where he was supposed to be?”
“Already looking,” she says. Keys clack on her end. “There’s a maintenance tracking system cross-linked to DOT approvals. Give me a sec to charm it.”
The seconds stretch like a wire. I listen to the faint tapping, the distant murmur of her environment, my own heartbeat roaring in my ears.
“Got it,” she says at last. “There’s a work order for Old Willow Road, flagged for a post-incident inspection, time-stamped the morning after your crash. Assigned to our guy. He filed his report two hours later.”
“Read it,” I say. I don’t recognize my own voice; it sounds scraped raw.
She clears her throat.
“Site conditions stable,” she recites. “Guardrail intact. No evidence of prior structural compromise. Impact damage consistent with vehicle leaving roadway at speed. Recommend no further remedial action.”
Guardrail intact.
I picture the photos Ruiz showed me, the ones from the crash scene. Metal curled around the car like a closing jaw, posts bent out of true, the rail speared through the engine block. Smoke and steam and coolant turning the ditch into a chemical fog. Intact.
My hands curl on the edge of the desk until my nails bite wood.
“He lied,” I say.
“He falsified an official safety inspection,” Liam adds, more for the record than as argument. “With direct corporate tie-ins. That’s perjury territory.”
“It’s worse than lying,” I say. Heat rises up my neck. “He hit us, left, and then got paid to show up the next day and declare the instrument of the damage blameless.”
Micro-hook: For the first time since Caleb’s obituary, I have a human name to write under the blank space where I’ve been keeping “fate.”
The contact makes a low, disgusted sound. “Look, I didn’t hear any of that,” she says. “Officially, I simply provided research support to a client inquiring about infrastructure contracts. You go public with this, my name stays in the VPN logs, nowhere else. Clear?”
“Clear,” Liam says.
“And Mara,” she adds, my name clipped with concern, “these people play ugly. If you move this piece on the board, brace for everything to flip.”
I stare at the report in my hand, the word ‘intact’ glaring up at me in neat PDF font. Caleb’s face floats over it in my mind, that half-smile he used when he knew he’d screwed up and wanted to charm his way through.
“It’s already flipped,” I say. “I just didn’t know where the hinge was.”
She goes quiet for a beat.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “I grew up driving past that curve. I’d want someone to burn their lives down for this, too.”
The line clicks off.
The office feels smaller suddenly, the air thicker. The faint smell of pine slipping in through the HVAC vents mixes with coffee and warm circuitry. Outside, a phone chimes in some neighboring house, that bright mechanical ping Maple Hollow uses to announce every comment, every tagged photo, every curated grief post.
“We have him,” I say. I lay the crew sheet and the inspection report side by side on Liam’s desk, aligning the name. “We have the car, the job, the lie.”
“We have enough to get Ruiz to reopen officially,” Liam says. His leg starts bouncing again. “Dashcam plus a falsified safety inspection tied to the driver. It won’t be clean, but it’s pressure.”
“It’s more than pressure,” I say. “It’s narrative. It’s proof that my memory wasn’t an indulgent fantasy. The night wasn’t just drunk kid, hysterical mom. It was a foreman in a company truck, late to check his own bad installation, using us as speed bumps and then erasing the evidence in his report.”
Liam looks at me, really looks, eyes searching my face.
“What does that make this for you?” he asks quietly. “Justice? Revenge? A lead chapter?”
My throat works. I think of the book draft they leaked, the threads I wove from instincts and half-memories. Of all the times I doubted my own brain, called it unreliable, volatile, traitorous.
“It makes it a story I can’t unknow,” I say. “And I’m done letting other people edit me out of it.”
I pick up my phone.
Ruiz’s contact sits near the top of my recents, above my therapist, above Tessa, above Jonah. The little circle next to his name is just an empty outline, no profile picture, no curated self.
My thumb hovers over the call icon. Glass and LEDs reflect my face back at me from every surface in the room: the monitor, the phone screen, the office window looking out onto Maple Hollow’s perfect lawns and imperfect secrets.
Micro-hook: I hold my breath and balance on the edge between dialing and deleting, knowing that whichever choice I make next will drag all of us—me, Liam, the foreman, Hart—in front of a camera we can’t control.