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Then they were gone.
Mia lay on the concrete and stared at the porch light.
The security camera was mounted just above it.
Evan had put it there himself after packages went missing from the neighborhood the previous Christmas.
He had been proud of it.
He had shown Mia how the app stored motion clips, how it saved everything in the cloud, how even deleted clips could sometimes be recovered from the account.
He had forgotten one thing.
The account was in Mia’s email.
Her phone was in her robe pocket.
She fumbled for it with fingers that felt thick and clumsy from cold.
The first time, she dropped it.
The screen hit the concrete and cracked across one corner.
She picked it up again.
At 8:29 a.m., she called 911.
The dispatcher’s voice came through calm and steady.
Mia gave her address.
Then she said the words she could barely understand were true.
“I’m pregnant. I fell. I’m bleeding. Please hurry.”
The dispatcher asked if she was alone.
Mia looked at the empty driveway.
“Yes,” she whispered.
The dispatcher asked if anyone had hurt her.
Mia shut her eyes.
The answer sat in her throat like ice.
For two years, she had softened sentences to survive them.
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