"Go to your room," her mother said. "I don't want to look at you."
Simone did not go to her room.
Every other time, she had gone. But her feet stayed where they were, on the edge of the rug, inches from the white dust, and she stood there in her uniform with her tie crooked and her face soaked and her empty backpack lying open on the floor like something gutted, and she did not go.
"Simone. I said—"
The front door opened behind her.
***
Calvin Whitaker had been sitting in his truck in the driveway for eleven minutes.
He had not meant to sit there. He had pulled in at five-fourteen with the engine ticking and his lunch cooler on the passenger seat and his phone in his hand, and he had meant to go straight in. But the phone had been in his hand since the stoplight on Route 9, and on the phone was the clip, and he had watched the clip four times already, and when he pulled into the driveway he watched it a fifth time, and then he just sat there with his thumb on the screen and the heater blowing on his knees.
The notification had come at three fifty-two that afternoon. *Motion detected: Living Room.* He had been standing in eight inches of mud at the Brookfield site arguing with a concrete subcontractor about a pour schedule, and he had glanced at the phone, and in the little preview square he had seen his son in the living room bouncing an orange ball, and he had thought, *I should call the house,* and then the sub had said something about the pump truck and Calvin had put the phone back in his jacket and not thought about it again for an hour and a half.
He had installed the camera himself, two summers ago, after somebody went down the whole street one night trying car doors. It was a small white thing on a bracket above the front door, inside, angled to see the entryway and most of the living room. Lorraine had wanted it at first. Then she'd forgotten it was there, the way you forget a smoke detector. She'd never put the app on her phone. Calvin had it on his. He got the alerts. He got them when the mail came, when the cat from two doors down walked past the window, when Simone came home on regular days at twenty after four and dropped her bag by the door and stood for a second in the entryway with her eyes closed before she went upstairs. He'd seen that a lot. He didn't know what it meant. He hadn't asked.
He had also seen Micah, in August, cross the living room with a full cup of grape juice held in both hands and his tongue between his teeth, concentrating very hard, and climb the stairs out of frame. There was no camera upstairs. All the living room camera had caught after that was Micah coming back down a minute later, fast, without the cup, with a purple stain down the front of his shirt, and going out the back door. That was not proof. That was what Calvin had told himself. That was not proof, and Simone had been at the neighbor's, and Lorraine had already decided, and the rug was already ruined, and what was the point.
He had bought a bottle of carpet cleaner on the way home from work the next day. It hadn't helped. They'd thrown the rug out anyway.
There had been other clips. Not many. A few. He did not let himself count them.
Now he sat in the truck and watched his son, for the sixth time, take Simone's basketball out from under his arm in the middle of the living room, look toward the stairs, and start dribbling. Badly, the way seven-year-olds dribble, slapping the ball with a flat palm, chasing it when it got away. The ball got away twice. The third time, Micah tried to catch it off a high bounce and it went off his fingers sideways and hit the shelf by the window, and the vase leaned, and leaned, and went over. There was no sound on the clip. Calvin had turned the sound off months ago because the alerts were loud on job sites. He was grateful for that. He did not think he could have stood to hear it.
In the clip, Micah stood very still. Then he looked at the stairs again. Then he walked over to the ball and nudged it with his foot, once, so it rolled up against the end table next to the biggest piece, and then he went to the kitchen and came back with a bag of goldfish crackers and sat down at the table and started eating them.
The clip ran out at three fifty-five. Simone was not in it anywhere. Simone, Calvin knew without checking, had been standing on a riser in the music room at St. Brendan's at three fifty-five, singing a part nobody would notice was there.