I tell myself I’m just going to check the weather.
That’s the lie I use to justify opening my laptop again at eleven thirty, long after any sane person in Maple Hollow has turned on their white noise machines and scheduled their grief posts for the morning. The house smells like cooled coffee and old toast. Outside my office window, fog pours down the slope of the cul-de-sac, thick enough to turn porch lights into blurred halos.
My browser opens to the tab I left last time, not the forecast but my security dashboard. Four camera thumbnails stare back at me in tidy quadrants: Front Porch, Driveway, Side Yard, Backyard. Four glass eyes, the only ones in this neighborhood that don’t pretend not to see.
“You’re stalling,” I tell myself.
I click into the Front Porch feed and pull up the calendar. The little grid pops over the image, tiny blue dots marking days with motion events. The biggest dot sits on the night of Caleb’s memorial. Of course it does. People streamed in and out, all those casseroles and careful hugs, a parade of eyes careful not to look at certain corners of the house.
I select that date. The timeline bar at the bottom fattens, a rainbow of colored blips for motion, sound, doorbell rings.
“One scene at a time,” my agent said in her text. Dr. Navarro said something similar about memories. Funny how everyone assumes I can just scrub to the important part.
I drag the playhead to early evening and hit play.
The front porch fills the screen: my peeling blue door, the crooked mat, the wreath Tessa insisted on hanging so the house would “feel welcoming.” People appear and disappear in sped-up jerks when I tap the fast-forward icon. Trays of food, florist-delivered arrangements, a white box of cupcakes with angel wings piped in frosting. Parents arriving with kids in stiff shirts and thrifted black dresses, clutching phones like security blankets.
The audio remains mercifully muted. I do not need to hear the recorded doorbell chime and preprogrammed “Leave package by the door” message my past self thought was clever.
I watch myself in fast motion too—opening the door, hugging, nodding. My mouth stretches and closes, speech reduced to pantomime, a silent film of a woman who looks uncannily like me but stands straighter.
Micro-hook: in the sped-up footage, grief upgrades into choreography.
My eyes keep drifting to the far corner of the frame beyond the porch steps, where a slice of Liam’s house is visible through the gap between the hedges. His front windows glow in rolling patterns that match the blue-white of monitors. At double speed, the light flickers like a heartbeat. I fast-forward to the moment I remember noticing him standing on his lawn watching us, but on the porch cam, the angle misses him. Just the edge of his driveway, empty.
“Wrong camera,” I mutter.
I exit to the four-quadrant view and click on Driveway. Same date. The timeline repopulates, dense with spikes. I scrub through car after car arriving and leaving, headlights blazing through the fog that pooled at the bottom of our short incline. The HOA sends passive-aggressive emails about wet leaves on driveways, but fog never makes the rules list.
At around 10:20 p.m., the last guests trickle away. Parents helping sleepy kids into car seats. Someone backing up too close to my trash bins. Then nothing but the scrape of branches and the occasional headlight smear. In the upper corner of the frame, Liam’s garage door yawns open and shut in fitful time-lapse. His sedan comes and goes twice.
I lean closer, elbows pressed into the edge of the desk. “Where were you, exactly?” I ask his grainy car.
The feed runs on until midnight. My porch light flicks off. The only motion spikes on the timeline are tiny—probably moths, or the spider that built a web on the camera and turned last fall into an eight-legged art film.
My gaze slides to the Side Yard thumbnail.
The side gate is how Caleb used to sneak out to meet friends so I wouldn’t hear the front door. It’s also the blind spot between my house and the neighbor’s, a narrow gravel path with a view of the fence and not much else. I only installed a camera there because the system offered a bundle discount. One more eye, watching the place I can’t.
I click.
The Side Yard view shows a sliver of siding, the wooden gate with its rusting latch, and a wedge of the backyard grass beyond. The camera’s night vision turns everything a flat, ghostly gray. Raindrops from earlier that day still cling to the lens, catching light from the far-off street like tiny stars.
I scroll back through the list of saved clips until the night of the memorial. The timeline is thinner here, fewer blips. Nobody thinks to use the side yard during a party except teenagers and thieves.
I hit play and speed it up. The gravel brightens and dims in loops as distant headlights sweep past the side of the house. Pine branches sway at the top of the frame. A cat crosses once, tail high, vanishing under the fence. The homes around us glow in muffled rectangles, glass panes catching and smearing that low-hanging fog.
Minutes on the timestamp tick forward. 9:58 p.m. 10:13. 10:14.
Then 10:27.
I frown. My brain registers the jump a beat after my eyes.
I tap the back arrow once, twice, but the playback hops from 10:14:22 to 10:27:03 every time. Thirteen minutes edited in the blink of a cursor.
My pulse picks up. “No,” I say softly. “No, you don’t get to do that.”
I drag the scrubber carefully, one frame at a time, so slow the footage lurches rather than flows. The seconds leading up to 10:14 show nothing unusual. Just the empty side yard, a faint mist, a tiny glitch of pixel static in the corner. Then—jump. New angle of the same yard, the gravel darker, the fog thicker.
Micro-hook: the hole in the footage feels louder than any motion alert.
I duck into the timeline options and double-check the filters. No event type turned off. No flag about missing data. Just that clean skip, as if the camera blinked and lost consciousness.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll work with what you give me.”
I let the footage roll from 10:27 at normal speed.
For a few seconds, nothing moves. The pine branch sways. A single droplet slides down the lens. Somewhere off-camera, a car door thunks shut; the audio captures it as a muffled thud.
Then a shape enters the frame from the left.
At first it reads as a smear, a darker gray on gray. I lean forward, my nose nearly touching the cold glass of the laptop. The figure advances along the gravel path from the front side of the house toward the gate, a human outline compressed by the wide-angle lens so the edges warp.
“Pause,” I whisper, even though the keyboard doesn’t need the word.
I tap the space bar. The figure freezes mid-stride, one leg angled, a shoulder cocked forward. A hood obscures the head. The resolution fights me when I zoom in; pixels break apart into square confetti. Still, the height lines up with an adult, not one of the neighbor kids sneaking a shortcut. Broad shoulders. No ponytail.
And in the figure’s hands, across the torso, something long and oblong, held tight.
My mind offers a list: baseball bat, tripod, rolled-up poster tube, crowbar, a long box, rifle—no, not that, too thin, security company would never store footage of something that obvious without a flag, right?
“Tool bag,” I tell myself. “Umbrella. Costco baguette.”
The joke lands flat in my mouth.
I rewind ten seconds and watch again in motion. The figure strides, not stumbling. No hesitation at the gate. One hand reaches up to the latch in a smooth, practiced move, the other still hugging the object. The hood hides the face from the camera’s angle.
I pause where the hand meets the latch. Pale fingers in the infrared. Not gloved. Nobody walks my side yard on a cold, foggy night barehanded unless they have a reason.
Every hair on my arms lifts.
“Who are you?” I ask the grainy stranger.
My memory offers nothing in return. That night, I was locked in my bedroom after the last dish went into the sink, door shut against the rest of the house. I remember a playlist of sad indie covers, my phone face-down, the weight of Liam’s earlier warning settling in my chest: Be careful what you dig up.
I do not remember anyone coming through the side yard gate.
I switch to the Backyard camera and sync the timestamps. 10:27:11.
The same figure appears a second later at the back fence line, crossing from the gate toward the far corner where the old shed sits. The oblong object trails behind now, one end dragging close to the grass. The fog thickens around the silhouette, turning the whole movement into something watery and surreal.
“Pause, zoom, pause, zoom,” I mutter, my fingers tapping out the commands in a nervous rhythm.
Each time, the pixels deteriorate. When I push the zoom too far, the figure becomes nothing but shifting squares of gray, a mosaic where a person used to be.
My heart hammers in my ears. This is what everyone tells me I need: objective reality, captured on camera. No concussion. No missing minutes. Just light bouncing into a lens.
And even here, the story refuses to stay whole.
I grab my phone and exit the camera app long enough to pull up the security company’s number. Their logo is a friendly blue shield, the kind Maple Hollow HOAs love to stick on signposts. Protecting what matters most, the tagline says. They mean lawn equipment, not guardrail conspiracies.
The call connects with a cheerful chime and a burst of tinny hold music. I pace the length of the room, the wood floor cool under my bare feet. The house creaks and contracts around me, every sound amplified.
“Thank you for calling HomeSentinel Support,” a recorded voice chirps. “This call may be monitored and recorded for quality assurance.”
“Good,” I say. “Record this.”
After a few menu labyrinths and a polite robot, a real person picks up. “This is Brian with Tier One Support. With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking tonight?”
“Mara Ellison,” I say. My voice sounds too level, so I let it sharpen. “I have an issue with missing footage from one of my cameras.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mara.” He leans on my name like we’re old friends. Keystrokes clack faintly in the background. “Can I get the email associated with your account?”
I give it, spell my last name twice. While he pulls up the account, I stare at the frozen image on my laptop: the hooded figure caught mid-step, the long object hugging his side. In the corner of the screen, the timestamp blinks 10:27:05.
“All right, I’m in,” Brian says. “What seems to be going on?”
“There’s a jump in my Side Yard recording on the night of March twelfth,” I say. “It skips thirteen minutes, then resumes with a stranger walking through my yard. I need to know why there’s a gap.”
He makes an interested noise that doesn’t sound interested. “Okay, let me pull up your device logs. Do you mind if I remote into your cameras?”
“Go ahead,” I say. “They’re already spying on me; one more set of eyes won’t hurt.”
He chuckles politely, missing the edge. “I’m just in your Side Yard cam now. I do see a short discontinuity flag around that time. Our system notes a temporary drop in your network bandwidth.”
“My internet cut out,” I repeat.
“Looks like you dropped from around twelve megabits per second down to two, briefly,” he says. “That can cause what we call compression artifacts and frame skipping in the stored video. The camera continues recording locally but may not upload every frame to the cloud. Totally normal.”
“Normal.” I swallow. My thumb digs into the phone casing. “So the missing thirteen minutes are… what? Taking a nap somewhere on a server farm?”
“They likely never made it to the server,” he says calmly. “You may see a timestamp jump when that happens. It doesn’t mean anything nefarious, just that the system is prioritizing keyframes to maintain the stream.”
The jargon scrapes across my nerves.
“Okay, but that’s not all,” I say. “Right after the jump, there’s a person in my yard. Hood up, carrying something I don’t recognize. I don’t remember anyone going back there. Is your system capable of being hacked? Of someone deleting just the part where they approach?”
Brian hesitates for a fraction of a second. “Our security protocols are very robust,” he says. “I don’t see any sign of unauthorized access in your logs. No admin logins besides your own. Based on what I’m seeing, this is just standard video compression behavior, especially in low-light with motion.”
“Standard behavior,” I repeat. I stand still now, toes gripping the planks. “Because from this end, it looks like someone walked into my yard during a thirteen-minute blackout and your cameras shrugged.”
He clears his throat. “I understand that can feel concerning. But what you’re describing—grainy motion, a bit of pixelation, a perceived jump—that’s very typical of how the codec handles data when bandwidth dips. Those figures can look… distorted. People will sometimes think they’re seeing more than what’s there.”
The words land in a too-familiar rhythm. People will think they’re seeing more than what’s there. Trauma brain. Collage art. Fiction leaks.
My fingers tighten on the phone. “I write thrillers,” I say. “I spend my life making things up. I don’t need help from my home security system.”
Brian laughs nervously. “Totally get that. Look, if you’re worried, I can ship you a free replacement unit, maybe upgrade you to our Pro cam with better low-light performance. But from a technical standpoint, this is just compression artifacts and dropped frames.”
I look at the screen. The figure’s outline staggers under the zoom, pixels breaking at the edges, turning the long object into an indistinct blur. Glass over lens over digital ghost.
“So your official explanation,” I say slowly, “for thirteen missing minutes on the night of my son’s memorial and a stranger with a long object in my backyard, is… bad Wi-Fi.”
“From our logs, yes,” he says. “There’s no indication of tampering. Sometimes data just doesn’t get recorded the way we’d like. That’s the reality of cloud-based systems.”
My laugh comes out too sharp. “Reality is the part I’m trying to hold onto.”
“I hear you,” he says, and he probably thinks he does. “Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?”
I look at the frozen image again. The stranger’s hood angles toward the camera, but I can’t make out a face. In the reflection on my laptop screen, my own face sits superimposed over his, ghosting his shape. For a dizzy second, the long, oblong object looks like a camera tripod. Or a crowbar. Or a rifle the codec refuses to name.
“No,” I say. “You’ve been very… helpful.”
We hang up with the usual scripted pleasantries. The line clicks dead. The house hums, the distant freeway murmurs, and someone’s phone chimes faintly across the cul-de-sac.
I sit back down and hit play.
On-screen, the hooded figure continues his silent path across my yard, pixels crawling over his outline. Thirteen minutes of my life lie folded somewhere between dropped frames and bad explanations, edited by systems I don’t control.
I watch the footage loop again and again, waiting for my cameras—or my memory—to tell me which parts of this story I am still allowed to trust.