Chapter 10: The Porch Camera

Two weeks later I sat in Torin's study at midnight with a borrowed tablet and my daughter's call log.

Hazel was asleep upstairs, with a new inhaler on her lanyard and a spare in my coat.

Torin had set a pot of tea on the desk and then, very carefully, taken the chair at the far end.

"You don't have to do this tonight," he said.

"The Moot is in a week."

"It's not a crime to have been frightened of a storm."

"I know." I opened the app. "That's why I need to see it."

I had set up the porch camera on the Redfern pack house the winter Hazel started school.

It covered the front steps and half the green.

I had forgotten it existed until I saw my own login saved on Hazel's old tablet.

Nobody had ever thought to change the password.

I scrolled the footage back to the night of the storm.

The first thing I saw was the lightning.

It lit the whole green white.

Then the picture steadied, and across the grass I could see Felicity's cottage with its porch light on.

The clock in the corner said 7:41 p.m.

"There," I said.

Felicity was on her porch in a raincoat, dragging two garden chairs under the roof.

She wasn't hurrying.

She stacked the chairs, brushed rain off her sleeves, and stood looking at the sky.

Her mouth moved.

I turned the volume up.

She was humming.

Torin leaned in.

He'd come around the desk without my noticing.

Now his shoulder was beside mine, close enough that I could feel the heat of it.

"She doesn't look afraid," he said, very quietly.

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