Chapter 2
"Nobody leaves with that card," Miles Ward announced.
Nora turned. Miles stood between the garden and the open French doors, his expression arranged into the patient concern he used with angry vendors. He had managed the Cole estate for nine years. Gabriel trusted him with gate codes, staff schedules, maintenance contractors, and the household's expensive security equipment.
"Since when do you make decisions about my children?" Gabriel asked.
"I don't," Miles said. "But chain of custody matters if there's been an allegation. Let me secure it."
Nora kept the card between her fingers. "You told me the east garden camera was disconnected in June."
"It was."
"Then why does the card contain footage from yesterday?"
Miles blinked once. "That's impossible."
"I thought so too."
Vivian caught his eye. It was a brief look, but Gabriel saw it. He had watched both of them coordinate household emergencies for years. That glance looked less like coordination than warning.
"My study," Gabriel said. "Now. Nora, bring the children. Miles, stay out."
"Gabriel, please," Vivian protested. "You're making a spectacle."
"You slapped an employee in our garden. The spectacle already happened."
He asked the foundation director to take over the event, then led Lily and Owen inside. Nora walked behind them with her left hand pressed to her cheek. The injury mattered, but the urgency came from the way Lily kept glancing over her shoulder.
In Gabriel's study, sunlight fell across framed photographs of Anne Cole, the children's mother. Anne had died two years earlier after a brief illness. She had photographed birds obsessively, especially the tiny finches that nested by the eastern hedge. Gabriel had never touched the little camera she mounted there.
"Can we watch it?" he asked.
Nora set the card on his desk. "I made a copy onto my laptop this morning. The original stays with me until we decide how to preserve it properly."
Gabriel looked startled by her firmness. Nora was startled too. She had spent nearly a year apologizing whenever she asked for basic childcare supplies.
She slipped the memory card into an adapter. The first video showed the east garden three days earlier. Lily stood beside the stone path with a blue ribbon in her hand. Vivian entered the frame and gripped the girl's upper arm.
There was no sound. The camera had been built for birds, not conversation. But Lily's feet dragged against the flagstones as Vivian pulled her toward a shaded side door.
"Stop," Gabriel said.
Nora paused the footage. Lily had wrapped both arms around herself.
"What happened after that?" Gabriel asked gently.
Lily stared at the frozen screen. "She told me to practice being quiet."
"Practice?"
"She said quiet girls get to stay with their families."
The room had become so quiet that Nora could hear the desk clock click between seconds. She was tempted to fill the silence with her own account of every nightmare and flinch, but Lily was the only person who knew what had happened when the blue door shut.
"You can stop talking whenever you want," Gabriel told her. "I won't ask you to prove anything to me right now."
Lily studied him, suspicious of a kindness that arrived after so many missed chances. "Even if it's important?"
"Especially then."
She leaned against his chair, not quite an embrace. Owen brought his bear over and placed it on the desk beside the laptop. Nora noticed that Gabriel's hand trembled as he moved the toy away from the drink coaster.
For once nobody suggested that the children were overreacting or that the adults should discuss it later. Gabriel wrote down their words as they spoke, distinguishing Lily's account from what he had seen himself. Nora understood that the night ahead would be full of questions, but they were finally asking the right ones.
Gabriel shut his eyes. When he opened them, he looked toward Owen, who had climbed into a chair with his bear.
"Did you hear that too?"
Owen nodded. "She locks the blue room."
Nora felt the temperature of the room change. The blue room was the former playroom near the east entrance, a place Vivian had declared off-limits because of renovations. Nora had seen no workers there in weeks.
"The door is locked from the outside," Lily said. "She says it's for thinking."
Gabriel stood so abruptly that his chair struck the wall.
"Not with them here," Nora warned, as he reached for the door. "Please. They need you to stay calm."
He stopped. That was the first time he took direction from Nora instead of dismissing her as overly protective.
His phone vibrated. A message from Miles appeared: SECURITY SYSTEM ACCESS TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. NECESSARY MAINTENANCE.
May you like
Gabriel looked at the screen, then at the memory card on his desk.
"Why," he asked, "would Miles shut down my cameras right now?"
