Chapter 3 The 0:47 Mark

POV: Zara Wells

Priya was already pulling up the video on her own phone when I locked the deadbolt.

"Sit down," Priya said.

"I'm fine standing."

She didn't argue. She scrubbed to the timestamp with her thumb, squinting at the screen the way she did when she was reading a contract. Priya had a law degree she never used because she had decided managing me was more interesting, which I used to find flattering and right then found terrifying because I needed a lawyer, not a manager, and I had neither.

"I can't make out his face clearly," she said.

"Keep watching."

The man turned. Just slightly. Priya went still.

"Who is that?"

"I don't know."

"You filmed him."

"I filmed the window light and my coffee cup. He's in the background, Priya. I didn't even see him when I was there."

She set her phone down on the counter, screen up, his half-lit face frozen on it. "Okay. Okay, so the news outlet is speculating. That's all this is right now. Speculation."

"Three users identified him."

"Three users on the internet. One of them probably also thinks the moon landing was a studio project."

"I need to see his face properly," I said.

Priya looked at me. "Zara."

"If it's nothing then I need to know it's nothing."

She didn't say don't do it. She just watched while I opened the video file on my laptop instead of my phone, full resolution, and dragged the timeline to 0:47 with the cursor.

I zoomed in until the pixels started to break apart and just before they did, his face resolved. Jaw. Cheekbone. The angle of his nose. One eye catching the café light.

I didn't know him. I was sure I didn't know him. But there was something about the way he was standing that made my brain insist he was not someone you forgot.

"Pull up the thread," I told Priya. "The long one. The forensic breakdown."

"Z, I don't think that's a good idea."

"Pull it up or I'll find it myself."

She found it faster than I would have. She read it first, which I knew because her expression changed before she handed me the laptop, and Priya's expression almost never changed during bad news. She had a face built for bad news.

Right then she looked like someone had paused her.

I took the laptop.

The thread was thorough. Whoever had written it had done actual research, not just guesswork, Photos. Comparisons. A name I had never heard before, referenced three times in news articles from the last four years, always in the background of something, never the center of it.

Never charged. Never convicted. Just present.

And then at the bottom of the thread, added twenty minutes ago, a single reply from the original poster.

Update: I've been asked to take this down. I'm not going to. If something happens to this account you know why.

I read it twice.

I looked at Priya.

"Someone asked them to remove it," I said.

"I see that."

"Which means someone is watching the thread."

"Or it's a stunt."

"Priya."

She closed her eyes for half a second. "I know."

My laptop made a sound. An email notification, which I almost ignored because I got forty a day, but the subject line was visible in the corner of the screen and it stopped me cold.

No sender name. Just an address made of random numbers. Subject line: You have until midnight.

The body of the email was four words.

Take it down. Please.

That last word was the thing that got me. Not the deadline. Not the anonymous address. The please. Like whoever had sent it was still trying to be civil about something that had stopped being civil the moment a news outlet used the word crime.

I looked at the timestamp on the email. It had come in while I was reading the thread.

Priya read it over my shoulder. I heard her breathe in slowly.

"We should call someone," she said.

"Who."

She didn't answer because there wasn't a clean answer.

I reached over and closed the laptop.

In the quiet I could hear the street outside. A car door. Someone's music. Normal sounds from a normal Tuesday in Brooklyn.

Then downstairs, something else.

A sound that wasn't the street.

Heavy. Deliberate. Like more than one person taking the stairs at the same time, not talking, not rushing, just moving up toward my floor with the specific patience of people who already knew exactly where they were going.

Priya heard it too. I knew because she reached over and grabbed my wrist.

We both looked at the door.

The knock, when it came, was not a knock.

It was a kick.