She stopped walking.

-What does that mean?

-It means he can log in from his phone and delete every clip in the cloud. Every clip. Tonight’s. And all the daytime ones. Two months of nap times on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Marquez’s eyes sharpened.

-Daytime?

-He told me he’d turned off daytime recording two weeks ago. He didn’t. He turned off the notifications. They’re all still there. Hundreds of them. Every afternoon his mother was alone with Chloe in that room.

-Have you watched them?

-No.

-Why not?

-Because if I watch them, Detective, I’m going to walk back into that room.

She didn’t say anything for a moment.

-Can you download them?

-Not all of them. Not fast. The app only lets you save one at a time. There are hundreds.

-Then I’ll call Nanit’s law enforcement line and send a preservation request. They’ll freeze the account on their end.

-How long?

-Depends who answers. Could be minutes. Could be hours.

-He’s sitting in that room with his phone in his pocket.

She looked back down the hallway toward the consultation room. An officer was already posted outside the door.

-I can’t take his phone without a warrant.

-I know.

-Can you change the password?

-He’d have to approve it. He set up two-factor on his device.

Marquez pulled out her phone and started dialing.

-Then we race him.

I sat in a plastic chair in the surgical waiting area and opened the Nanit app.

I started saving clips.

One at a time.

The app was slow. Each clip took twenty to thirty seconds to download. I started with the oldest daytime ones. Eight weeks ago. Monday. Afternoon nap. I didn’t watch them. I just pressed save. Waited for the bar. Pressed save again.

Monday. Wednesday. Friday.

Monday. Wednesday. Friday.

Fourteen clips. Fifteen. Sixteen.

At 4:21, my screen flickered.

A gray banner slid down from the top of the app.

Account settings updated.

My stomach dropped.

I went back to the event log.

The daytime clips were disappearing.

Not all at once. One at a time. From the top of the list, the most recent ones. Tuesday. Monday. Friday last week. Gone. Gone. Gone.

He was deleting them.

He was sitting forty feet away in a beige room with a police officer outside the door, and he was scrolling through his phone deleting video of his mother alone with his daughter.

I stood up.

I didn’t run. I walked down the hallway very fast. Past the nurses’ station. Past the officer outside the consultation room door.

-Officer, he’s destroying evidence on his phone right now. Live. Deleting video from the account. Tell Detective Marquez.

The officer looked at me. Then at the door.

He opened it.

Christopher was sitting on the couch with his phone in both hands. His thumb was moving fast across the screen. Gertrude was beside him, watching over his shoulder.

He looked up and saw the officer.

He saw me behind the officer.

His thumb kept moving.

-Sir, put the phone down.

-I’m just checking my email.

-Put it down. Now.

Christopher looked at me.

And he smiled.

Very small. Very brief. The smile he used to give me across a crowded room at parties when he’d said something clever and wanted me to notice.

Then he put the phone face down on the couch cushion.

The officer picked it up. He didn’t look at the screen. He bagged it and held it.

Delacroix stood up from the other couch.

-You have no right to seize that phone without a warrant.

-It’s evidence of an ongoing crime, counselor. Exigent circumstances.

-You’ll be hearing from me.

-I’m sure I will.

I looked back at my own phone.

The event log was still shrinking. Even with Christopher’s phone in an evidence bag, the deletions he’d already queued were still processing on the server. The list scrolled up as clips vanished from the bottom.

Then it stopped.

A new banner appeared.

Account locked. Please contact support.

Marquez had gotten through.

I looked at what was left.

Tonight’s clips. All three. Untouched.

The daytime clips I’d saved to my phone. Sixteen of them.

And in the cloud, still listed, a column of clips from the first five weeks. The ones Christopher hadn’t reached yet. He’d started with the most recent. He’d been working backward.

He’d deleted three weeks.

He’d missed five.

Marquez came down the hallway.

-Nanit froze the account. Their law enforcement desk said whatever’s still there is preserved. Server-side. They’ll pull the deleted ones from their backups too. Most of the time they keep them for thirty days.

-Most of the time.

-Most of the time.

She looked at the officer holding Christopher’s phone in the evidence bag. Then at Christopher through the open door.

-Mr. Vaughn, you just destroyed evidence in front of a police officer in the middle of a child abuse investigation. Do you understand what you just did?