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The place where my memory began wasn't the place where the recording began.

Doryu gave me enough time to understand that before asking quietly, “Do you want me to play it?”

Every instinct I had told me no.

I'd spent more than twenty years knowing what happened on those stairs, and certainty, even when it destroyed you, could become a strange kind of safety. If I didn't watch this, nothing had to change. My mother would still be dead, I would still be responsible, and my father would still own the secret I'd built my entire adult life around.

Except I'd already seen my father tonight.

I'd watched him stagger around an arena after gambling away the money I'd given him less than two days ago, and for the first time, I'd understood that there would never be enough. I could pay him until one of us died and he would still come back for more because my fear was the only thing he'd ever owned that never ran out.

I nodded. “Play it.”

Doryu pressed the key.

My mother appeared on the screen, and every other thought disappeared.

I'd forgotten the way she moved.

That realization hurt so much that for a few seconds I barely noticed anything else. She'd been thirty-three when she died, just a year older than Max was now, and the years had reduced her to fragments no matter how desperately I'd tried to hold on to them. Brown hair that curled when it rained. A soft voice when she read to me. Hand cream that smelled like vanilla. Fingers wrapped tightly around mine whenever we crossed a road.

On Doryu's laptop, she wasn't a collection of memories.

She was alive.

She pushed through the doorway and hurried toward the stairs, one hand gripping the railing while she looked back over her shoulder. A second later, a little boy appeared behind her with a backpack bouncing against his shoulders.

I stopped breathing.

I'd known I was seven. Of course I had. The number had been part of every explanation I'd ever given myself, but memory had always kept me inside that body, looking outward, and somehow, I'd never understood what seven looked like from the outside.

I was tiny.

My legs were skinny beneath shorts that came almost to my knees, my T-shirt hung off one shoulder, and my backpack looked too big for me. I was trying desperately to keep up with my mother, taking the steps too quickly because she was moving too quickly, and even through the grainy security footage I could see the urgency in both of us.

Mom reached the next landing.

I followed.

Then my sneaker caught.

The movement was so small I almost missed it. The toe clipped the edge of the concrete step and my ankle folded beneath me, pitching my entire body forward. My arms flew out instinctively as I tried to stop myself, except Mom was directly in front of me and there was nowhere else for my hands to go.

They struck her back.

She lost her balance.

Doryu stopped the video before she fell out of frame.

The suite became completely silent.

I kept staring at the screen because my brain couldn't reconcile what I'd just seen with the version I'd carried for most of my life. Both recordings contained the same moment—my hands hitting my mother's back—but this one had started seconds earlier, and those extra seconds changed everything that came afterward.

“Play it again.”

Doryu didn't question me. He returned to the beginning and let it run while I leaned closer, this time forcing myself not to look at Mom.

I watched the boy.