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Somehow, that means more than everything she just said.

She begins to narrate her thought process.“We have the tapes. We have the logs. We have surveillance screenshots and the library of Elaine Turner at our disposal. And we have you, whose success rate at getting people to ignore rules is frankly concerning.”

I almost protest, but she cuts me off with a look. “Let’s just watch the videos,” she says. “The rest of them, and then all of them again if we have to.”

I look at her, hair sticking out in every direction, and I want to say something meaningful. Something that might leave a mark on her in the way she’s left one on me.

But she’s already queuing up the next tape, already moving forward, so I swallow it and pull my own chair beside her.

20

BREAKTHROUGH

BARYN

The footage starts with a still shot of the tube launch parking lot—daylight, cars glinting under the late-summer sun. For ten minutes, nothing happens. A squirrel crosses the frame. There is, for reasons I cannot explain, a long sequence where Casey records the sound of her own footsteps on gravel.

Serena watches all of it intently. The way Casey talks with her hands. The faces she makes at whoever is holding the camera. The way her whole body folds in on itself when she laughs. Serena seems to be taking in every second of her, collecting all the small, ordinary pieces that years of missing-person posters and police reports couldn’t preserve.

Once, Casey laughs so hard she snorts, and the corner of Serena’s mouth lifts.

She doesn’t seem to realize she’s smiling.

Tape two is from a school event. There’s a jump cut to a classroom, everyone crammed together for some last-day-of-the-year party. I see a younger Serena, hair longer and streaked with the white that would become her signature. She’s so much more animated, her hands flying through the air as she lands a joke with a group of her peers. Casey is behind the camera, narrating in a mockumentary voice.

After six minutes of aimless teenage chatter, something outside catches Casey’s attention. The camera swings toward the window, briefly losing focus before settling on the parking lot below. Two teachers are in the middle of an argument. One of them throws a clipboard.

“Do you think that’s⁠—?”

“No.” Serena rolls her eyes. “It’s just Mrs. Dullard losing her mind again. She used to throw things when the HVAC went out.”

Tape three is a night recording—Casey hiking the ridgeline with a headlamp, narrating every footfall with running commentary. The beam of light slices through the dark, painting the rocks with streaks of blue-white. I watch Serena watching it, her face a perfect blank.

Casey keeps climbing. The camera pans back to the start, to show how far she’s come. There’s a lingering shot of the town below: distant, glittering, safe.

The next hour passes one tape at a time. When one ends, Serena ejects it, writes something on the label, and reaches for another. I fill pages of the legal pad beside her. Names. Dates. Places. Anything that might matter later.

Mostly, though, there’s nothing worth noting.

Casey complains about homework. She eats cereal straight from the box and argues with someone off camera about whose turn it is to drive. Every so often, Serena supplies a name or a piece of context, but otherwise we let Casey fill the room.

It’s hypnotic, the repetition. So much so that when the TV screen flickers to black and starts chewing on static, we both sit there for a full thirty seconds before Serena blinks and says, “Well. That’s three hours of nothing.”

“Nothing useful,” I correct. “At least, not to the investigation.”

Her eyes shift to mine.

I nod toward the stack of tapes. “There’s a difference.”

She just looks at me. Then something in her expression softens. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “There is.”

I clean up the debris from the bed, re-stack the files, and make us both another coffee. Serena sits with her eyes closed, her breathing slow and even, like she’s recharging at a cellular level.

I look at the stack of tapes. There are still three left. Maybe, I think, this was all a wild goose chase.

Or maybe we just need to look for a little longer.

When she opens her eyes again, I hold up one of the tapes. “One more?”