"Please. Just keep looking. A little longer."
"My wife and my child — they can't have died for nothing."
The shock of losing Julia had put me in the hospital. When I refused to eat, refused treatment, it was Silas who stayed at my bedside day and night, coaxing me back from the edge, over and over again.
"Mom, you're the most important person Julia had. If she's watching from up there and sees you like this — imagine how heartbroken she'd be."
Without Silas, I might never have pulled through.
It was precisely because I had felt his devotion firsthand that I couldn't make sense of what was gnawing at me now.
Who was lying?
If Silas was the one deceiving me, then where had he learned the name Sunny?
And why would he lie to me about something like that?
If Julia had been lying to Silas, then what was the purpose behind everything she'd said to him?
Was she trying to pass along some kind of message?
I was still turning it over in my mind, getting nowhere, when my phone rang.
It was Captain Theodore Finch, the lead detective on the task force.
He got straight to the point the moment I picked up, his tone grave.
"Mrs. Henson, someone anonymously sent us a secretly recorded video from the night your daughter was killed."
The news hit me so hard my knees nearly buckled.
Silas, standing close enough to hear, went wide-eyed. He lunged toward the phone, voice charged with urgency.
"Captain Finch, are you serious?"
"I am," Finch replied, all business.
"Can you both come down to the task force office now?"
We nodded at the same time and scrambled to answer.
"Yes, yes. We'll be right there!"
The second I hung up, Silas rushed me to the car and drove straight to the task force headquarters.
The whole way there, his hands trembled on the steering wheel. He had the gas pedal floored.
He clearly wanted the killer found yesterday.
We arrived quickly.
Captain Finch was already waiting in the conference room, a laptop open on the table in front of him.
When he saw us walk in, he didn't waste a breath.
"Our forensic tech team just finished authenticating the footage. The entire video is clean. No tampering whatsoever."
"I need you both to watch carefully and tell me if you recognize the person in it."
He clicked play.
Because it was nighttime, in an alley with no streetlights, the footage was dark. But I could make out the location clearly enough. It was the place where my daughter had been killed.