I couldn’t unsee it.
No matter how many times I blinked, no matter how many times I told myself it was just a shadow, just a distorted frame, just my mind trying to make sense of chaos. It still looked like him.
Daniel. Standing there and watching.
I stepped back from the screen slowly, my chest tightening with every breath, like something inside me was collapsing in slow motion. The security guard said something, I think he said my name. but it didn’t land. None of it did.
Because my thoughts had already moved ahead. Too fast. “If that’s him…” I murmured. The sentence didn’t finish.
Because if that was Daniel in the footage, if he was there when my father was taken, then everything I thought I understood had just shifted into something I didn’t recognize.
“No,” I said again, but thi
