Chapter 20: The Flashlight

The room watched my footage in silence, and I watched the room.

When the woman on the screen looked left, then right, then straight into the lens, someone in the third row said "No."

When she sat on the third step and tucked her hair behind her ear, a man in the front said a word his wife told him not to say.

When she lay down and put a hand on her stomach, four hundred people made the same sound.

Then the screen showed me slamming my trunk and turning around, bewildered, with my arms open.

The prosecutor was on his feet.

His plate had slid off his knee and broken on the floor, and he did not look down.

"That's fake," Cassidy said.

She was at the foot of the steps, and her voice cracked in the middle.

"That's fake," she said again, louder. "It's been edited. They can do anything with computers now."

"The date is in the corner," someone called.

"Anyone can type a date!"

Brice had come up beside her with his lawyer, a thin man in a gray suit holding a folder to his chest.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the lawyer began. "This is a doctored video, presented by a woman with a record of..."

"I have something else," I said into the microphone.

I took out Roz's old phone, and I turned the volume all the way up and held it against the mic.

"This is from Thursday morning, in Brice's office."

I pressed play.

*"She had a plan. I let it run."*

It was Brice's voice, flat and clear, and it filled the showroom.

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