She puffs a sarcastic laugh, a phlegmy sound. “Yeah, well, he better, because when he gets back I’m going to kill him. This snowstorm has taken five years off my life. If I hadn’t put about a billion hours into this project myself, I would’ve blown it off, kind of like Paul is doing now.” The laptop beeps, and she yanks the external drive out and drops it in her bag. “Wish me luck.”

“Luck.”

She snatches her coat from the back of another chair and leaves in a huff of swirling snow. A blast of icy wind slams the door behind her.

I shrug off my coat, drape it over the back of my chair to dry and step to Gwen’s desk, where Paul’s laptop sits open. I smile at the wallpaper, a selfie of us, a close-up from a trip to Charleston last summer, all big smiles and tanned cheeks. The Cedar Hill files are lined up neatly along the right side of Paul’s head, and I skim them from top to bottom. His entire life resides on this hunk of plastic and metal. His correspondence, his finances, his calendar and to-do lists.

And the camera footage. The one Sam is sending a subpoena for.

The security website is bookmarked under House, the password the same one he uses for everything. It takes me a couple of minutes to figure out how to pull up the footage, then to limit the clips to the ones recorded after 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. My heart gives a hard kick when it spits out dozens of clips. Why so many?

I click on the first one, at just past five, the one of Paul and me returning from town. I smile at the way he helps me out of the boat, with an easy tug into his arms. He swings me around and dips me over an arm right there on the dock. Something catches in my chest at the image of us, so happy and obviously in love. I think of Sam watching this same clip. Maybe then he’ll finally believe my feelings are real.

I move on to the next clip, working through them one by one, my shoulders relaxing a notch with each one. A deer on the edge of the lake. A fox shooting down the hill. Dark smudges moving on a dark screen, too faint to make out. But what’s clear is that in none of them is there a man, Paul or otherwise, tossing a body from the dock.