Emma poured a glass of Malbec and clicked into her sister’s feed. Bethany had posted a video that had already kicked off a roll of commentary. If Emma was lucky, she might even catch a post snapping into the chain while she was watching. It always startled her. A little thrill to be psychically caught by the only people she’d want to be caught by. Could they feel her there, watching as they typed?

She previewed the stacked responses first. Hi, Mom, she thought, as she always did when their mother showed up on the screen.

Emma took a big swallow of wine to put a different kind of lump in her throat.

Several people she knew (because she couldn’t bring herself to admit it was had known, unfixably past tense) had commented—Wow! Grrl power! That was awesome! That poor baby.

She started the video, primed with interest, fully ready to be with them in spirit and as impressed as everyone else, trying to be content to click on what they had clicked and watch what they had seen. With them, but not.

The video had a nature-show feel to it. The built-in dread of the camera’s vantage point stopped Emma’s wineglass halfway to her mouth—a young girl in the role of the antelope, with a grim young lion-guy prowling after her. Emma watched him close in and corner the girl at her front door. The next camera shift brought up the interior of the house.

Even if the advancing progress bar at the bottom of the frame hadn’t shown that the adventure was almost over, the natural rhythm of narrative did. The fight, life-or-death, would happen inside the house. One way or the other, it was nearly The End.

But all Emma knew in the moment of the scene change was the burning spur of a beginning. Not a starting gun, but a cannon, a bomb blast. Heat swept up her body as she stared at the screen in disbelief. She moved her glass toward the desk, but the base hit the edge of the wood instead of landing home. Emma barely flinched as it crashed into shards on the floor.

The foyer of the house on the computer screen was bog-standard suburban. A six-panel door. A plain glass light fixture up above, full of flame-shaped bulbs. Big beige tiles set in a diamond pattern on the floor. A bench along the left wall faced off with a hall table against the right.

The desperate struggle played out between the human animals in the middle of the image, but Emma couldn’t pull her eyes away from the right side of the screen. The historian, the expert hiding within the scarred, quiet caregiver, stirred.

Above the table, with just a corner showing at the edge of the field of capture, was a painting.