She liked the nickname and liked the softball curses he sent her way sometimes, even if her mother didn’t. He was there with them. It was nice. She smiled into his hug.

He pulled her away by the shoulders and fixed her in a hard stare. “You okay?”

She nodded, but had to hold her bottom lip with her teeth to keep her from crumpling into ugly cry face.

John shifted his gaze beyond her, to the cops milling around the living room. He pulled in a deep breath and sucked his teeth, sizing them up like bad weather.

Carly felt forgotten in his grip, and John’s scowl made her look back over her shoulder, too, to double-check that the same nice men she’d been talking to were what he was laser beaming.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

But when his eyes met hers again, the question cranked in her head to a loud, looping Whatswrong whatswrong-ohno-whatswrong?

They both tracked for what they could read in each other’s thoughts. She saw . . . what exactly? And he saw that she did . . . something (NO!). The corners of John’s mouth turned down and he shook his head, just a little. Did he want her not to worry? Was he saying sorry? Sorry for what? The questions hummed in the air between them.

“Mr. Cooper?”  The taller detective walked up, hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you. Glad my guys found you. Thanks for your help.”

“Sure,” John said.

“I just got a message that the video clips are up on the website. Do you have somewhere where we can all look at this together? We’ll see if maybe you guys recognize him.”

The security cameras. Carly had forgotten about them. “Oh, wow! You can see him? You saw him—”

Her mother talked over her, grabbing at John’s arm. “Did you get a good look at him? Are the pictures clear enough? Can they use it to . . .”

John chewed at the corner of his lip and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh.”

They filed into the study, Carly, her mother, John, and the five cops left in the house, to see what the local police had posted to their Alerts web page.

Carly discovered, while watching the video, that there were actually two of her in the room, not counting her image on the screen. There was the Carly who could feel her body. She was standing just to the right of her stepfather, who was sitting at his desk manning the mouse and the keyboard.

That particular Carly’s hands were cold and her eyes burned from lack of blinking. That Carly trembled. That Carly felt a little sick watching the video and making a new memory of what had happened. And of what had almost happened.