Samantha inserted the flash drive into the chapel’s small media system.
The screen behind the altar flickered from black to gray.
Silas stood several feet away from me, one hand still raised as though he had only just remembered he had struck me.
Margot remained near the back pew.
Her face had lost its smugness, but she had not yet understood what was inside the box.
Detective Miller closed the chapel doors.
“No one leaves,” he said.
The first image appeared on the screen.
It was grainy traffic footage from the afternoon of the crash.
Rain swept across an intersection two blocks from the road where my children had died.
The timestamp in the corner marked the recording as beginning fourteen minutes before the impact.
A small car moved through the frame.
I recognized it immediately.
The babysitter was driving.
Rose and her brother were in the back seat, hidden behind rain-streaked glass.
Three seconds later, a dark SUV entered the frame behind them.
Margot took one step backward.
Silas did not move.
Detective Miller paused the footage and enlarged the image.
The license plate was difficult to read, but the camera had captured the driver through the windshield when lightning brightened the intersection.
Margot’s face filled the chapel screen.
A murmur traveled through the pews.
“That could be anyone,” she said.
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Miller resumed the video.
The SUV stayed close behind the babysitter’s car, matching every turn.
When the car slowed, the SUV slowed.
When it changed lanes, the SUV followed.
Silas finally looked toward Margot.
She stared at him as though waiting for instructions.
The next recording came from a city bus traveling in the opposite direction.
Its exterior camera captured the same two vehicles entering the narrow road beside the retaining wall.
The SUV accelerated.
Its front bumper struck the rear side of the babysitter’s car.
The car swerved, corrected, and continued.
The SUV struck it again.
This time the smaller vehicle spun across the wet pavement and slammed through the weakened roadside barrier.
Several people in the chapel cried out.
I could not.
I had imagined my children’s final moments every night for three weeks.
I had imagined skidding tires, rain, confusion, and the babysitter fighting to regain control.
I had not imagined another vehicle pushing them toward the edge.
The video froze before the car disappeared down the embankment.
My hand closed around the white ribbon tied to Rose’s coffin.
Silas pointed at the screen.
“It proves there was another vehicle,” he said.
“It doesn’t prove we had anything to do with it.”
Detective Miller looked at him calmly.
“We’re not finished.”
Samantha removed a second flash drive from the evidence box.
The next footage came from a closed gas station near the entrance to the road.
Its security cameras had continued recording even though the business had been empty for months.
Eight minutes before the crash, the dark SUV pulled beneath the abandoned station’s canopy.
Another car was already waiting there.
Silas’s car.
The image showed him standing beside the driver’s door in the same gray coat he had worn when police first notified us about the crash.
