He went to his car and pulled out his laptop from the trunk. While it booted up, he glanced at me. “Why did you leave the room? You lose your stomach for this?”

Ray had walked close to me all the way back through the studios, the secret garden, down the tiled halls, out the glass doors. As if to catch me if I stumbled. I didn’t want to lie to him or Janis, but I was afraid if I showed the DVD to Janis now, she would take possession of it, and it wouldn’t be mine, my discovery.

I felt a grip on my arm. “It’s all right,” said Janis. “Grief works in strange ways. You didn’t know Brenae personally, but you feel like you do now. It’s all right to feel sick about it.”

She kept her hand on me, wearing a concerned, maternal frown, and I almost confessed my discovery, but she swiveled back to Ray. “Go on, then. Show us what you’ve got.”

Ray set the laptop on his trunk and lifted his screen. “Tell me what you see,” he said. “On the floor, next to them.”

Lesson in Red played again, the whole excruciating thing. It was getting harder and harder for me to view the man pushing into her. The more I knew about Brenae. The more I knew about Erik. Beside me, I felt Janis shifting from foot to foot.

“This footage is monstrous,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”

“There,” said Ray, hitting pause and pointing to something on the floor by the bed. “What does that look like?”

A tiny, pointed thing, white and shining.

A glue-on star.

My nerves prickled. The plastic star, if it was a star, wasn’t proof that the video was from Brenae’s studio. But it was close. If Brenae had shot the video at LAAC, and not while she was an undergraduate, it refuted everything Erik had said. Erik had claimed the relationship was over. Erik had claimed it was all about sex and that he’d ended it over a year ago. But it didn’t look ended at all.

“And there,” said Ray, touching a shadowed rectangle on the wall beside the mattress. “That’s an outlet that matches one in the studio. It’s right beneath a couple of screw holes in the ceiling where Brenae could have mounted a camera. She may have even knocked down the star, mounting it.”

“Well,” said Janis, satisfaction in her tone. “Isn’t that something.”

Cars were pulling into the parking lot now, and I looked over at LAAC, the scattering of students heading into the building with their knapsacks and instrument cases, ready for their classes.

“I want you to see the new museum site,” Janis added to Ray. “My driver will take you to the Westing,” she told me. “It’s your last day there, honey. Nelson wants his old assistant back.”