An hour later, Troy and I are huddled together in a small meeting room watching the screen of my laptop, hypnotized by the hours of video unfurling in front of us: uninterrupted footage from a GUH surveillance camera trained on the corridor that connects the maternity area with the midwife birthing section.

I am afraid to blink, afraid to lift the can of Diet Pepsi to my lips. I’ve gotta stay glued to the computer screen for that one second when the possible clue shows up, that wonderful moment when the TV detective yells, “Hold it. Go back a little. Yeah, right there.”

The viewing is a combination of the hypnotically fascinating and the numbingly boring at the same time. We watch it on a higher speed than normal, but not so high that we can’t catch virtually everything that’s going on—quite a few very pregnant women, a few postnatal women walking with portable IVs, doctors walking with an entourage of residents, visitors laughing, visitors crying. It’s an interminable film of doctors and nurses and orderlies and janitors and visitors and patients and security guards and gurneys and janitor carts. The surveillance camera records life on the corridor in fuzzy black and white some of the time and fuzzy color at other times. The camera placement gives a strange angle to anyone captured by its lens. The camera is positioned on the ceiling, so high up that each person’s head is large and their body is much smaller, narrowing down to very teeny-tiny feet. Everyone on camera is either walking toward or away from the vanishing point.

“Okay,” I say to Troy, neither of us looking away from the screen. “While we’re here watching this fabulous movie, I really would like to know how you managed to get your hands on these surveillance DVDs.”

“I have my secret ways,” says Troy. He speaks so seriously that I’m actually a little creeped out. He’s not being sarcastic. He’s not being funny. He’s telling the truth.

“Did you steal them?”

“Not really. Let’s just say I have some tight connections.”

“Could you be a little clearer?” I ask. “C’mon. How’d you get these?”

“I just act my charming self. The ladies like me. The gentlemen who are so inclined also like me. Could it be my professionally whitened teeth, the cut of my Zegna jeans, or—” Troy, who has not stopped studying the monitor while carrying on jokingly about his good looks and charm, suddenly shouts, “Hold the video, Lucy!”