The thumbnails came first, because thumbnails always come first. Video files carry small stills of themselves tucked into their own headers, and the card had kept them the way a coat keeps bus tickets. Emma laid them out in a grid and sorted them by the timestamps burned into their corners, and the party assembled itself in postage stamps.
String lights. The long table. Her father raising a glass, younger in the way that hurt most, not grey, not thin. Her mother laughing with her head back. Sarah at the end of the table with the candles lit in front of her, wearing the dress, wearing the ring, lit up like the centre of the only world there was.
21:38. Sarah standing, glass in hand, mid-laugh.
21:41. The dock, empty, the lake flat and dark beyond it.
That was the DVR's story too. But the card had kept giving after the archive had been made to stop.
21:44. The dock again β and not empty.
Emma enlarged it until the pixels stood apart like bricks. Two figures at the end of the dock, at the very edge of the camera's useful light. One was a woman in a pale dress, and even reduced to thirty grey squares the set of her shoulders was so familiar that Emma's body knew it before her mind consented to: Sarah. The other stood close β too close for celebration. A tall man, dark suit, his face turned away into shadow, one hand raised halfway, arrested mid-gesture. Between them, even in that ruin of an image, you could see the distance was not the distance of lovers. It was the distance of a line being drawn.
There was one more still, stamped 21:49, and Emma almost discarded it as a duplicate of 21:41 β the dock empty, the lake flat, the party a glow beyond the frame. It was only on the third pass, blinking the two images against each other, that she saw it: at the far edge of the dock, where the path came up from the boathouse, the dark was a slightly different dark. A shape, or the rumour of one, no taller than the rail. She enhanced it until the pixels gave up and became weather. Whatever had crossed that dock in the last of the eleven minutes, the card had kept only its shadow β and the shadow kept its counsel.
She told herself, professionally, that she could not identify the man. She told herself that in a courtroom she would say the same. Then she sat for a long time with her hands over her face, because there was only one man on earth it could be, in a dark suit, alone with Sarah on the dock at 21:44, in the minutes somebody had paid eleven minutes of silence to erase.
The audio came that second night, near three in the morning.
It arrived as orphans: scraps of soundtrack with no picture married to them, torn from their containers by the card's decay. Most were lake noise. Water against the pilings. A loon, once, absurdly clear. Music leaking down from the house. Then a scrap, forty seconds long by its own clock, that began with a shoe on wet wood.
A man's voice, low, urgent, shredded by compression into gravel β "...can't do this here, not tonight, listen to me β "
And then her sister, seventeen years of memory and ten years of silence notwithstanding, unmistakable, close to the camera's microphone, not shouting. Worse than shouting. Perfectly controlled, and shaking underneath the control, the way Emma alone of everyone alive might have recognised:
"You knew. You both knew."
The fragment ended there, mid-breath, on the edge of whatever he said back β dead cells swallowing the reply whole.
She did the professional thing then, because the professional thing was the only rope she had. She pulled the waveform up beside the one recording of Sarah's adult voice she had never been able to delete β a birthday toast, twenty-nine seconds, Sarah laughing through half of it β and compared them the way she would have for any court in the country. The match was not close. The match was total. Whatever else the card had lost, it had not lost her sister, and Emma sat in the dark study with the two graphs glowing green on the screen and let the certainty in like cold water: the voice on the dock was Sarah's, and in the missing minutes Sarah had known everything.
Emma played it eleven times. She counted, on the twelfth, without deciding to. She played it while the study clock ticked and her father's breathing came and went down the hall, and on the last playing she stopped being an analyst for one whole minute and was seventeen again, asleep upstairs in the blue room with her door shut against the music, while down at the end of the dock her sister stood in her engagement dress and said the truest sentence of her life to a man who had known all along.
You both knew.
Both. Not you. Both.
She wrote it down β the words, the timestamp, the file offsets, the hash values, everything a court would want, in her small exact hand, because that was what she had instead of screaming. Then she wrote the question that the fragment had carried up out of the dark water of that card and laid at her feet like the thing the lake had owed them all along.
If Marcus was one of the two, who was the other?
There was a living person who might know. There had always been a living person who might know, and Emma had spent ten years not asking her, because asking her meant the night might turn out to be a different night than the one Emma had built her whole guilt on. The maid of honour. The best friend. The woman who had got on a plane a month after the memorial and never once come back β not for Helen's funeral, not for anything.
Emma opened a new page and wrote a name she had not written in a decade.
PRIYA.
Chapter 9: Priya
Finding people was, in the end, most of Emma's job, and she was ashamed of how easy Priya was to find. That was the part she could not forgive herself for, afterward. Ten years of not looking had been dressed up, all that time, as respect β for Priya's grief, for Priya's new life, for the clean cut of it. It had taken her one evening. A school board newsletter from Toronto, PDF, two winters old, a photograph of a science fair and a caption: Ms. P. Anand, whose robotics team had placed second in the province. Grey before her time, the caption didn't say. The photograph did. Priya at thirty-nine had her mother's face coming on early, and the grey had taken the front of her hair in a single bright streak, like something that had happened to her all at once.