Never In Another Life novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Clip

Declan's POV

I never slept in that motel.

At four in the morning I sat on the edge of the bed with my laptop on my knees and Sammy's breathing steady beside me.

I had watched the video of Sunday nine times.

Under it were thousands of comments from people who said she should be in jail.

I closed the laptop.

Then I opened it again and did the thing I had been afraid of for three years.

The lake house had a camera at the top of the stairs.

I had put it in the year Sammy started walking, because Kira worried about the steps.

She'd said, "Just in case."

The week Sammy broke his arm, my mother told me the camera had been off.

Margo told me the same thing, with her hand on my back.

I had believed them both.

I had believed everyone who stood in a room and looked at me with wet eyes.

The app still lived on my old phone, which I had kept in a drawer because I couldn't throw away anything that had her face in it.

I plugged it in and waited for it to wake up.

The login screen asked for a password.

I typed her birthday, the way I had when I set it up, because I'd never thought of a better one.

It opened.

The account was still paying for itself.

A yearly renewal charged to a credit card I'd forgotten, because I had stopped looking at anything with her name on it.

Extended history, the plan said, sixty months.

My stomach turned over.

The fall was three years and four days ago.

That was well inside the window.

I scrolled to the week of the fall and counted back.

There was an event.

A thumbnail of the staircase, gray and blurry, the timestamp 11:42 a.m.

My mother had deleted it from her copy of the app.

She had been a shared user.

She had never been the owner.

The clip had stayed on the server, sitting in the dark, all this time, because the owner never pressed a button.

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