“What did you tell her?”
“Thirty days unless I manually preserve something.”
Rachel stepped closer to the desk. “And then?”
“She asked whether I could save footage without anyone knowing.”
Rachel’s pulse changed again, faster now.
“Did you?”
Mara met her eyes. “Yes.”
The answer came without apology.
Rachel’s hospital instincts took over for a moment, shoving aside panic with procedure. “What footage?”
“Every time she came in. Every time the man driving her was visible. Every pickup I could identify.”
“Derek.”
“I know his name now.”
The implication caught Rachel’s attention. “Now?”
Mara clicked through folders on the laptop. “Audrey never introduced him. The first month, I assumed he was her father.”
Rachel almost laughed, but the sound would have been too close to hysteria. Derek and Scott were built nothing alike. Scott was broad through the shoulders, already silvering at the temples. Derek was leaner, darker, always clean-shaven and carefully put together. But from a distance, through a window, to a teacher juggling thirty students and three classes, he would simply have been the middle-aged man who brought Audrey.
