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Ash’s gaze moved slowly toward the screen.

“The file he’s been using isn’t original footage. It’s been edited, and once I knew what I was looking for, I was able to trace the security system from the building.” Doryu turned the laptop toward him but didn’t touch the trackpad.

“There was more than one camera covering the fire escape.”

Something changed in Ash’s face.

Hope would’ve been too simple a word for it.

Hope assumed you wanted the answer.

Ash looked terrified of it.

Doryu seemed to understand because he didn’t tell him everything was going to be okay or promise that what he’d found would erase twenty years of guilt.

He simply waited.

Eventually, Ash looked at the screen.

Doryu rested his hand beside the laptop. “Your father showed you the part where your mother fell.”

Ash’s breathing caught.

Doryu’s voice softened. “He didn’t show you why.”

Chapter eighteen

Line Change - When players leave the ice and are replaced by teammates from the bench, often while play is still continuing.

Ash

For most of my life, the video had been less than thirty seconds long, but I knew every second of it well enough that I hadn't needed to watch it in years.

I knew the gray concrete wall behind the fire escape, the rusting metal railing, and the narrow strip of afternoon light cutting across the steps. More than anything, I knew the small boy who appeared behind his mother, running too fast down stairs that were too steep for his legs, and the moment his hands struck the middle of her back.

After that came the fall.

My father had shown it to me when I was seven, after my mother died, and then again years later when I started earning enough money for the video to become useful to him. By then I hadn't needed the reminder. I'd spent most of my life replaying those few seconds without his help, sometimes in dreams but more often when I was awake, because guilt apparently didn't need an invitation.

Now I stood in Ignatius's hotel suite staring at a completely different view of the same fire escape while Doryu waited for me to decide whether I wanted to watch the part my father had never shown me.

I couldn't make myself tell him to press play.

Max was somewhere behind my right shoulder, close enough that I could feel his presence without looking at him. He hadn't touched me since we'd entered the room, and I knew that was deliberate. A few days ago, I probably would've interpreted the distance as uncertainty or even rejection, but now I understood him well enough to know how badly he wanted to reach for me and how hard he was working not to make that decision for me.

For once, I was grateful.

I wasn't sure I could stand without him, but I needed to find out.

“What do you mean, there was another camera?”

Doryu kept his attention on me rather than the laptop. “The building used a four-camera security system. The footage your father has been using came from a camera covering the lower section of the fire escape, but it doesn't start until you and your mother were already coming down. Once I traced the original system, I found an archived recording from a second camera mounted higher on the building.”

I looked back at the frozen image.

The angle was wrong.

That was the first thing my brain kept insisting on, as though Doryu had accidentally pulled up footage of somebody else's tragedy. The fire escape was familiar, but I could see more of it now: the landing above, several additional steps, and part of the doorway my mother and I had come through.