Chapter 2 - What the Cameras Remembered
I read Ruth's message three times before I called her.
“Are you certain?” I whispered.
“I took the picture myself,” she said. “I went up there to ask him a question your mother never answered.”
“Then you knew he was alive?”
“I knew something was wrong. That's different.”
Maya arrived at my apartment while Ruth was still on the line. She took one look at my cheek and set her briefcase down without asking a question. I put Ruth on speaker.
“Whatever you have,” Maya told her, “please keep the originals. We may need to establish where every record came from.”
Ruth promised nothing more than a meeting the next afternoon. She sounded frightened, but when she hung up, it was my own face in the dark window that unsettled me most. I had spent my childhood leaving flowers at a grave without a body.
Maya opened her laptop. “Let's handle what happened today first.”
We wrote out the exact sequence in the showroom while it was fresh. Nathan's words. Celeste's position by the diamond case. The clerk with the tray. The fact that I had removed the ring after the assault, not before it.
“Will the police get the footage?” I asked.
“They can request it and pursue legal process if necessary. We're also sending a preservation notice directly to the business. We don't get to seize a store's recordings because we want them.”
The distinction angered me. Nathan had spent years telling people that Vale Atelier existed because of him, even though my mother had established the company before he graduated high school. In my mind, the cameras still belonged to her.
They didn't. Not in any way that mattered that night.
At ten, a woman named Rosa Park called. She was the showroom's operations manager. I remembered her interviewing for the job after a difficult divorce, when Nathan had said she would be “too distracted.” I'd persuaded him to hire her.
“I'm not calling as your employee,” Rosa began. “I'm calling because I saw what happened.”
My throat tightened.
“The system automatically overwrites some recordings,” she continued. “I followed our incident procedure and marked today's files for retention. I can tell the investigating officer where to find them.”
“Thank you.”
“Don't thank me yet. Nathan's already telling people you lunged at Celeste.”
He had started rewriting the day before my bruises had finished forming.
The next morning Maya filed notice of our divorce action and a separate civil challenge to the purported voting direction. She warned me that claiming an equitable share of Nathan's marital property was not the same as receiving it on demand.
“I wasn't promising a verdict,” I said. “I needed him to understand I wasn't afraid to make the claim.”
A courier arrived before lunch with an envelope from Vale Atelier's legal department. Inside was a notice informing me that my access badge had been suspended pending an investigation into “disruptive conduct.”
May you like
At the bottom, beneath Nathan's typed name, appeared a second signature.
Esther Wynn. My mother's oldest friend. The trustee who was supposed to protect my shares until Friday.
