The footage was of a rainy Tuesday in a coffee shop that no longer existed. There was no dialogue, just the low hum of an espresso machine and the rhythmic tapping of rain against the glass. The camera was propped up against a sugar shaker, capturing a woman sitting across the table. She wasn't looking at the lens; she was staring out the window, a small, private smile playing on her lips as she watched a child splash in a puddle outside.
When he double-clicked it, the screen didn't show a high-definition movie or a viral clip. Instead, the video flickered to life with the grainy, shaky quality of a phone camera from a decade ago. m (28).mp4
He had found it on an old, silver flash drive tucked into the back of a desk drawer. The drive was scratched, its casing cracked, but when he plugged it in, the file appeared. It sat there, 142 megabytes of data, nested between "taxes_2019.pdf" and "resume_draft_final_v2.docx." The footage was of a rainy Tuesday in