My lawyer, Andrea Kessler, told me not to go back to that house alone, so she drove me through the Whitmore gate herself on a Thursday morning at nine.

The grass was still wet and the chairs from the reception were stacked in rows under a tarp.

Theo was hosing down the patio and he turned the water off when he saw us.

He’s a quiet man with a sunburned neck, and he has worked that property since before Daniel came home from college.

Andrea didn’t waste time.

“The camera over the pool house door.

Does it record?”

Theo looked at the ground.

“That camera’s been off since Saturday,” he said.

“Off, or erased?”

He didn’t answer, and then he walked us to the pool house and unlocked it.

The room smelled like chlorine and old cedar, and there was a monitor on a shelf next to a plastic bin of towels.

Theo wiped his hands on his jeans and pulled up the footage.

The timestamp read 6:38 p.m.

I saw myself on the far side of the patio, near the steps, talking to two of Daniel’s colleagues from the firm.

I remembered that conversation.

I remembered laughing at something one of them said about the drive up from the city.

Then Celia came into the frame, and Margaret was with her.

Margaret was in her gray-blue dress with her hand on Celia’s arm, and they were walking along the shallow end, toward the corner where the stone gets slick.

Margaret stopped.

I watched her pull back, plant her heels, shake her head the way she did when she was frightened and trying not to show it.

Celia took her arm above the elbow.

And Margaret’s left foot slid out from under her on the wet stone, and she went into the water sideways.

I heard myself make a sound in that little room, and Andrea put her hand on my shoulder.

The file stopped at 6:44.

It didn’t jump or glitch.

It ended clean, like a sentence cut off with scissors.

“Where’s the rest of it?”

Andrea asked.

“That’s what I’ve got,” Theo said.

Andrea folded her arms.

“Mr. Whitmore’s sister came out here Saturday morning before anyone was awake.

Did she say anything to you about this equipment?”

Theo was quiet for a long moment.

“She asked me to wipe the pool camera,” he said.

“She said the family needed privacy and there were lawyers who’d make trouble over guests being filmed.

She offered me four hundred dollars.”

“Did you take it?”

“I told her I’d take care of it.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone.

“I’ve got a pension coming in three years, ma’am,” he said to me.

“I’d like to keep it.

But I went home that morning and I didn’t feel right, so I pulled the file onto this before I cleared anything.”

He played it for us.

It was the same minute I’d just watched, and then it kept going.

Daniel came running from the terrace in his jacket and went into the water without taking his shoes off.

Celia stood at the edge of the pool with her hands at her sides.

She never reached down.

She looked at her mother in the water for four full seconds before she turned around and picked up the medication pouch from the chair behind her.

Andrea had Theo send the file to her phone and to a second number, her paralegal’s, and she made him write down the time and the date he had pulled it.

When we walked back out to the car, she stopped with her hand on the roof.

“This gets the criminal complaint off the table,” she said.

“It doesn’t get your life back.”

I was about to ask her what that meant when I saw the terrace doors open.

Celia stepped out into the morning sun in a pale green dress, holding a coffee cup, and stood very still when she saw who was standing on the patio.