Chapter 21: Unplugged

The bar moved from one to two hundred while I stood there.

"Garner," I said.

He was already moving.

He dropped the cable, dove under the sound desk and ripped the router's plug out of the wall.

The loft's lights flickered, and the live feed froze on Bree's face.

The progress bar stopped at 1,114.

Bree jabbed the keys, then the trackpad, then the keys again.

"It's offline," she said. "You turned off the internet."

"I did," Garner said, standing up with dust on his jacket.

"You can't do that."

"I just did."

"You don't have the sense to do that."

"I've had a very long week, Bree."

She turned on him, and for the first time her face was not lovely at all.

It was pinched and red, with the mouth gone thin, and I saw what she looked like when nobody was watching.

"I gave you everything," she said. "Eight years of fame. You'd have been a man who sold carpet."

"Probably," Garner said. "It would have been an honest job."

I picked up the gray laptop.

It was warm.

Somewhere behind its screen were a thousand videos of a girl in a boat.

In the oldest ones, a woman in a hat laughed at the tiller.

"You stood in my pantry," I said.

Bree stared at me.

"I screamed into a dish towel at three in the morning, and you were up in the flour, watching it."

"You had a camera in my daughter's toy," I said.

"It was only footage."

"It was my life."

"It was a better life when I edited it."

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