Chapter 4 - WHAT THE CAMERA COULDN’T SEE
Detective Lena Ortiz arrived before sunset.
Roman expected fear, judgment, or a carefully worded favor.
She offered none of them.
“Your name doesn’t change my questions,” she said.
“Good.”
He gave her his phone and agreed to provide the estate’s recordings. When Charles began answering for him, Roman stopped him.
“I’ll find separate counsel.”
Charles’s expression hardened for one brief second.
“After twenty years?”
“Especially after twenty years.”
Ortiz asked why a child had been the first person to notice Nicholas missing.
Roman could have blamed the nurse. The guards. His grief.
“Because I wasn’t looking,” he said.
The words hurt worse spoken aloud.
At the estate, Dean preserved the camera system instead of allowing the household technician to reset it. The nursery display had been pointed to a saved recording. The actual camera had been disconnected.
Someone had known exactly how the family checked on Nicholas.
In the hospital room, Roman watched his son sleep beneath a blanket that moved in real time.
He counted breaths until the nurse gently told him to sit down.
“You can hold his hand,” she said.
He did.
Hours later, his sister Vivian walked in carrying a leather handbag and the calm expression she wore at funerals.
“Oh, Roman.”
She touched his shoulder. He didn’t lean into it.
“Charles called you?”
“Of course.”
“Before or after the ambulance?”
Her hand fell away.
“What kind of question is that?”
“An easy one.”
Vivian looked at Nicholas, then at the chair Roman had pulled beside the bed.
“You’ve barely entered his nursery in months. You can’t pretend one afternoon changes that.”
He swallowed.
Because part of what she said was true.
His phone vibrated.
Dean had found footage from the service entrance. At 2:19, Elise carried Nicholas toward the silver sedan. At 2:24, she returned without him.
At 2:26, Charles stepped outside and spoke to her.
Roman opened the attached still image.
Charles stood beside the garden wall, one hand extended.
May you like
Elise was placing something in his palm.
The silver swallow on the key ring caught the sunlight.
