Chapter 6: Nineteen Cameras

There were nineteen cameras on the museum steps.

I counted them from the back seat of the car while Nathaniel's driver idled at the curb.

"You don't have to go out there," Nathaniel said.

"If I don't, that recording is the only thing they hear."

"Then I'm coming with you."

"Terms," I said. "You can't touch me in private."

"We're not in private."

He had a point, and he opened the door before I could argue.

The shouting started when my shoes hit the pavement.

"Mrs. Lathrop! Did you sell the video?"

"Did you marry him for money?"

"Is the recording real?"

Nathaniel walked half a step ahead of me with one shoulder turned, and the cameras parted for him.

A man with a microphone pushed in too close, and Nathaniel put out his split-knuckled hand and moved him back a foot.

He didn't say a word.

The man stopped.

At the top of the steps, I turned around.

I had no notes.

I had never spoken in front of a camera in my life.

"My name is Imogen Ward," I said. "I keep my name. I work in the conservation lab upstairs. That recording is not mine."

"It's your voice," a reporter shouted.

"It's my voice, cut together from five years of voicemails and birthday toasts."

"Can you prove that?"

"No," I said. "But I can tell you who sent it."

Nathaniel took a folded page from inside his jacket and put it in my hand.

I hadn't known he had it.

It was a printout of an email, with the header lines marked in yellow.

"The message that carried this audio to your newsrooms at three this morning says it came from an anonymous source," I said.

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