The Memory Auction That Destroyed Us All Chapter 04

The Memory Auction That Destroyed Us All Chapter 04

Ethan looked up through wet eyes. The face on the screen reflected back in his pupils.

I knew it then. The secret I’d spent ten years holding was gone.

“That’s the scene. She saw the whole thing.”

“The driver who ran is about to show up. We’re finally going to get a name.”

The car in my memory kept coming. Closer and closer.

Everyone in the room held their breath.

Ten feet away, the car switched on its high beams.

I threw my hand up against the glare.

White light. Then the sound of impact, one crash stacking onto another.

That was where the memory ended.

The technicians froze the frame right at the moment the lights came on and threw it up full-size on the screen.

“I need a face. That’s not a face. Who am I supposed to identify from a washed-out frame?”

Ethan grabbed the auctioneer’s gavel off the table and put it through the monitor.

“Run it again. There has to be more. If she hadn’t seen the driver clearly she wouldn’t have fought this hard for this long.”

He was almost gone by then. He kept looping the same few seconds of footage, over and over, until the families started physically pulling at his arms.

“Ethan. Stop. Let it go.”

“My son has been dead for ten years. Seeing this much, he can rest. Let him rest.”

The families formed a line around him. One after another they told him it was enough.

Because you can’t fake what isn’t there.

“No. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe she doesn’t know.”

“She’s been running games on me since the beginning. The police said the same thing. She knows.”

He was shaking. He reached under the console and came up with a second set of probes.

He walked toward me. His voice dropped into something quiet and worse than shouting.

“Claire. I told you I came here tonight with one purpose. You won’t give it to me. So let me help you remember.”

No hesitation. Two more needles went straight into the top of my skull.

The screen jumped back to life. Ethan exhaled like something had broken loose in his chest.

“I knew it. I knew she was still holding back.”

But the screen wasn’t the rainy night.

Static. Then sunlight.

A racetrack on a clear afternoon. Sophie was pushing me into the driver’s seat of a car.

“We’re adults now. We’re supposed to do things that scare us a little.”

I looked over at her and then sideways at Ethan, already strapped in, watching us both.

The people in the auction house looked at each other.

“Is this before the crash? It doesn’t look like it’s the same night.”

“Maybe they raced all the time. Maybe she’s trying to say the whole thing was an accident.”

Ethan’s voice came through the speakers, younger, easy.

“Drive well. I bet on you.”

On screen I went red. My foot stayed light on the accelerator the whole race because of him sitting behind me.

He lost that bet.

I hid behind a folding tent afterward and listened to him say it out loud to someone.

“I’m in love with Claire. She’s been on her own since her parents left. I’m going to be her person. Sophie’s going to be her family.”

Everyone in the room put it together at once.

“She’s playing the emotional angle. Does she not see that he’s already past the point of no return?”

“Emotional angle? She’s rubbing his face in the fact that he used to love her. That’s all this is.”

Having it said out loud in a room full of strangers didn’t make Ethan flinch.

He did what I had done that night on the road with Sophie’s hand in mine. He picked up my bloody hand and held it.

“Claire. You knew how I felt about you. So why. Why did you burn all three of us down.”

“You protected the person who did this. Did you stop caring about me that much? Did you stop caring about yourself?”

The anger drained out of him. He went slack. His whole body just gave up and he sank down against the examination table.

The screen kept flickering. Following the line of my vision, locking onto a single point in the frame.

“I see it. Claire’s been telling us the whole time.”

“The driver. It’s her. She’s the one who was behind the wheel.”

Ethan raised his eyes to the screen.

Everything went out of him at once.