One evening in January, after dinner, she was doing homework at the kitchen table and I was washing dishes, and she said, without looking up from her math worksheet, “Mom, I don’t feel like I have to watch anymore.”
I turned off the water. “Watch what?”
“Everything.” She erased something and blew the shavings off the page. “I used to watch everything all the time. Like if I stopped paying attention something bad would happen and I wouldn’t have proof.”
I dried my hands and sat down across from her. “And now?”
She looked up. Her eyes, brown and serious and so much older than ten, held mine for a moment. “Now I don’t think I need proof anymore. I think people just believe us now.”
I reached across the table and put my hand over hers. She let me hold it for a few seconds, then pulled away gently and went back to her math, and I sat there watching her work, watching her erase and rewrite and move on to the next problem, and I thought about the folder she had named on that tablet, the folder that contained the video that had changed everything,
