The Video on the Stage Steps

The campaign launch is running exactly the way I designed it. The brass quartet swells under the white columns of Greybridge City Hall, the camera crews hold on Owen's smile, and the crowd keeps giving me the kind of soft, obedient laughter that says the town is ready to love him in a larger zip code. I am halfway down the stage steps, checking the timing for the donors' receiving line, when my phone buzzes with a blocked number and a file name that looks like static.

I almost ignore it. Then the preview frame loads, and my knees forget what the stairs are for.

Tessa is sitting on a motel bed with cheap floral sheets behind her and water stains shaped like wings on the wall. Her hair is shorter than the last time I saw her alive and darker at the roots. A digital alarm clock glows in the frame. The date is tonight. The time is eight minutes ago. My sister looks directly into the camera with the kind of exhausted focus people get after fear burns everything else away.

"Sloane," she says, and even through the speaker I hear the old edge in her voice, the one that used to cut me open at fourteen and make me follow her anyway. "You buried the wrong woman. Don't let Owen get to Poppy first."

The video ends. For one long second I hear only the crowd chanting my husband's name out on the plaza. Then Owen touches my elbow from behind. "You're up," he says lightly. "Come stand with me for the family shot."

I turn, and the man I married is beautiful in the exact way polished liars tend to be. Navy suit. easy grin. hands open at the right angle for photographs. If Tessa is alive, then six years of grief become evidence, and every picture I have taken with Owen since our wedding becomes something stranger and uglier than betrayal.

"You look pale," he says.

I lock my phone and slide it into my clutch before he can see my hand shaking. "Just the lights."

He studies me half a second too long. Then he smiles for the cameras again and guides me toward the stage. Out in the plaza, somebody starts chanting Hart for Carolina. Owen lifts my hand like we're already the version of ourselves the state is supposed to vote for.

I smile because I built this moment, because a woman who just watched her dead sister speak cannot collapse in front of four local stations and a livestream audience, because Poppy is somewhere in the first row wearing the blue dress I picked for her and I do not yet know what Owen means in Tessa's warning. While the cameras flash, I open the video one more time inside my clutch and freeze on the alarm clock. The time is real. The date is real. My sister was alive eight minutes ago.