She deserved it.” My mother said those words while my three-year-old daughter lay on the kitchen floor.

Exit 42 off Interstate 85 was a graveyard of abandoned textile mills and rusted diesel pumps. The Red Kettle Diner sat at the corner of the frontage road, its neon sign half-dead, its gravel lot empty save for a mud-spattered Ford F-150 with Washington state plates.

I parked the sedan behind a row of rusted shipping containers, stepped out into the damp morning chill, and pulled my wool coat tight around my throat.

The bell above the diner door jingled softly as I entered. In the corner booth, sitting with his back against the wall so he could observe both the front entrance and the kitchen exit, was a man who looked like a ghost carved out of granite.

Eli was thirty-nine now. The boyish softness I remembered from my five-year-old vantage point was gone. His hair was cropped short, flecked with gray at the temples, and a three-inch scar traced a jagged white line from the edge of his left eye down to his jawline. His hands, resting flat on the laminate table, were broad, calloused, and bore the grease-stained hallmarks of a man who worked with iron and diesel for a living.

As I approached the booth, he stood up.

For a heartbeat, neither of us moved. Then Eli stepped forward, wrapped his arms around me, and pulled me into an embrace that smelled of engine oil, cedar smoke, and safety. I buried my face in his heavy canvas coat and let myself weep for sixty seconds—the only sixty seconds of weakness I would allow myself.

"You grew up," Eli whispered, his hand resting on the back of my head. "God, Claire. You look just like her. Before she turned into him."

We sat down. Eli slid a mug of black coffee toward me.

"Abernathy reduced the charges to a misdemeanor," I told him, getting straight to the core. "Vance claimed Dad has a neuromuscular tremor. Mom is threatening to call the note on our house."

Eli didn't look surprised. He reached into his coat and pulled out an external hard drive, placing it on the table between us.

"Who took the video?" Eli asked.

"What video?"

"Helen told me there was a man with a phone raised in the foyer," Eli said, his eyes narrowing. "She said he was standing behind Paige when Lily went down."

The memory flashed through my mind: the panic, the sound of glass breaking, the red pool on the tile, and a young man in a gray suit holding up an iPhone, his face pale with horror.

"Todd Miller," I whispered. "No relation to Ben. He’s Paige’s fiancé’s cousin. He works in software architecture for the bank."

"Todd Miller didn't leave through the front door," Eli said, leaning forward. "Helen watched him slip out through the sunroom while the paramedics were working on Lily. He looked terrified. If he recorded that room, Vance has already visited him."

"If Vance got to him, the video is gone," I said, my heart sinking. "Arthur would have paid him whatever he asked, or threatened to blackball him from the financial sector."

Eli pulled out a small black flip phone and tapped the screen. "Todd Miller didn't delete it. He tried to upload it to a private cloud server at two o’clock this morning. But his home IP address was blocked by an external network firewall ten minutes later."

I stared at my brother. "How do you know that?"

"Because for the last ten years, I haven't just been repairing boats, Claire," Eli said, a cold, predatory smile touching the corners of his mouth. "I’ve been watching Elmwood Terrace. Every contractor they hired, every server they installed, every router that crossed their threshold. When Todd’s upload stalled, my network pinged the packet failure. The video is still on his local hard drive. But we have about two hours before Vance’s IT contractors execute a remote wipe through his corporate device management software."