Not Her
Aria
I stared at the screen and felt my whole chest go cold.
“That can’t be her,” I said. “My mother was upstairs. She’s been upstairs since two o’clock.”
“Are you certain,” Sophia said carefully. She wasn’t pushing, just asking, the way she asked everything — flat, factual, giving the question room to breathe.
“I said goodnight to her an hour ago,” I said. “She was in bed. I saw her.”
Caden hadn’t moved. He was still staring at the frozen frame, jaw tight, and I watched him do the thing he did when he was forcing himself to be rational instead of reactive.
“Pull up the timestamp,” he said quietly.
Sophia clicked through. The footage was timestamped seven fifty-six pm. The fire had started at eight oh one.
“Diane was with me at seven fifty-six,” I said slowly, working it o
