The Landing

Trevor called back the moment his plane touched down, and I have never in sixty-three years of living heard a grown man's voice break the way his did when I played him thirty seconds of that recording over speakerphone in an airport parking lot.

He didn't go home. He went straight to my house, held his daughter for eleven full minutes without saying a single word, and then sat down at my kitchen table and started making calls — a family lawyer, a CPS emergency line, a locksmith, in an order that told me exactly how his mind was working before he'd said any of it out loud.

"I need to see everything," he said to me, once Piper was finally asleep on my couch. "Every camera clip from the last month. I need to know if this was really the first time."

We pulled up the cloud archive together at my kitchen table at eleven that night, scrolling through weeks of mundane footage — breakfasts, homework, Piper doing cartwheels in the living room — looking for anything else that might matter.

That was when Trevor went very still.

"There are gaps," he said slowly, scrolling back further. "Three mornings. All from the weeks I was traveling. The footage just — isn't here. Deleted."

He pulled up the account activity log, hands moving faster now, and found exactly what neither of us wanted to find: three deletions, all made from a device logged in as Colette's phone, all timestamped within an hour of the missing footage, all on mornings I hadn't been checking the app myself because I'd trusted, foolishly, that everything was fine when Trevor was home to notice things I couldn't.

"This wasn't the first time," Trevor said. "She's been doing this for a while. And she knew exactly how to make sure nobody would ever see it."