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A soft, deliberate blur along the top of the headboard and up onto the wall, a patch of the frame where the detail had been smoothed away to nothing. Not motion blur. Not bad light. I’d stared at tens of thousands of hours of footage in my life and I knew the difference between an image that was soft and an image that had been made soft. Someone had taken a brush to that part of the picture. Someone had reached into this video and rubbed something out.

“That’s not natural,” I said. My training had caught up with me a day too late. “That’s a paint-over. Somebody hid something there.”

“Hid what?” Dutch asked quietly.

I knew what hung on that wall. A framed circuit board. The first one I ever soldered. I was twelve. Wren had found it in a box when she moved her stuff in. She’d hung it over our bed.

“Go back.” I was already out of the chair, already at the screen, my hand shaking as I pointed. “The lamp. Freeze it on the lamp.”

Dutch rewound it. Froze it.

I’d put that dent in the shade the first morning Wren stayed, reaching for my cell in the dark so I wouldn’t wake her.

That was our room.

That’s us, Seb.

She’d given me the answer while the video played and I’d shouted over her.

Fuck.

“Look at his skin,” I said, and my voice had gone flat and mechanical, the only way I could keep talking. “Play it. Slow. Quarter speed.”

Dutch played it, and this time I did the thing I’d refused to do since the file landed. I watched the man.

His skin caught the light wrong. Too even, too smooth. There was a delay—tiny, a few milliseconds, invisible unless you’d spent your life hunting for exactly this—between his expressions and the movement underneath them.

A deepfake. I’d have caught it in under a minute on any video in the world. Any video that wasn’t of Wren. Because on this one, I never looked at the man. Not once. I only ever looked at her.

“His hands,” Handful said softly, from somewhere behind me. He had it. Chairs shifted as the rest of the room caught up. “Glitch. The way he’s lying. His arm.”

Fuck.

It was me.

That was my body. My weight on my elbow. My hand, the one I’d traced down her a thousand times. Our bedroom, our bed, my private video, the one I’d talked her into on a rainy Sunday and sworn on my life I’d keep locked down where no eyes other than mine would ever find it.

I’ll keep it safe, I’d told her. No one will ever see it but me.

Somebody had reached into my system and taken the one moment she’d trusted to me. They’d put a stranger’s face over mine and sent it back knowing what I’d do.

Knowing that I’d trust the screen over the woman.

Knowing that I’d never look past her body to the room she was lying in.

Knowing that I’d burn my own life to the ground and call it self-respect.

Her voice came back to me, then, the words I’d heard and thrown away.

That’s us, Seb.

She’d told me. She’d recognized it the instant it hit the screen. She’d tried to make me look and I had called her a bitch.

I called her a bitch.

I threw her out.

For a video of her loving me.