I watched them from a laptop in a Fremont rental, and I hated myself.
The feed came through a camera Petra had placed on the bookshelf in my parents' living room three weeks ago. Small. Black. Tucked behind a framed photo of me at eight years old, holding a fish I'd caught with my father off the Tacoma pier. Dominic was smiling in that photo. I was missing a front tooth.
He was not smiling now.
The email hit their inbox at 6:14 AM. Dominic was already awake. He'd been awake for three days, since Gavin's phone call about the college friend. He hadn't slept because a father knows. Not the details. The shape of a wrongness. He'd been sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee in the dark, and when the tablet chimed, he picked it up with the calm hands of a man who had spent forty years fixing water main breaks in the rain.
He watched the video once.
His face did not move.
He watched it again.
Then he set the tablet down very carefully on the placemat and walked to the bedroom.
"Greta," he said. His voice was so quiet.
I turned the volume up on my laptop. I could hear my mother stirring. The rustle of sheets. Her sleepy voice: "Dom? What time is it?"
"Come out here, honey. I need you to come out here."
She came out in her robe. The blue one with the frayed cuff she'd had since I was in high school. Her hair was flat on one side. She sat down at the kitchen table because Dominic pulled out the chair for her, and Dominic never pulled out chairs. She looked at his face. Then at the tablet.
"Play it," she said.
He played it.
My voice — Alicia's voice, wearing my throat like a coat — filled their kitchen.
*Mom. Dad. It's me. I'm okay. I'm scared but I'm okay.*
Greta made a sound. Not a scream. Something smaller and worse. Like the air had been punched out of her chest through a hole no one could see.
Her hands went to the tablet. She tried to hold it. She couldn't. Her fingers wouldn't close. Dominic caught it before it hit the floor. He set it down and put his hand over hers on the table, and I watched my mother's shoulders begin to shake, and I put my knuckles in my mouth and I bit down.
I had known this would happen.
I had planned it.
And still.
---
They did not call the police.
The email had been very clear about that. And my parents were not the kind of people who took chances with their daughter's life. My father read the wire instructions three times. Copied them onto a legal pad in his careful block handwriting. He looked at the number.
Eight hundred thousand dollars.
He said, "We have it."
Greta looked at him.
"The 401(k)," he said. "The Roth. The emergency fund. The CDs. Your mother's jewelry."
"Dom—"
"We have it, Greta."
She nodded. She was still crying, but her nodding was firm.
"Then we have it," she said.
---
I watched my father spend the next thirty-six hours dismantling forty years of careful, working-class arithmetic.
He called Vanguard at 9:01 AM when the phones opened. Explained he needed an emergency full liquidation. The representative asked if he'd consulted a tax advisor. Dominic said, "No, ma'am, and it doesn't matter." His voice never rose. The penalties would be brutal. He signed the electronic forms without reading them.
Greta drove downtown to a jeweler on Pacific Avenue. She carried a velvet box in her purse. Inside: the pearl earrings her mother had worn to her own wedding in 1958. The gold and garnet brooch that had been in the Hansen family for four generations. She sat across from the appraiser and watched him turn the pearls over under a jeweler's loupe.
He offered her a number.
She said, "Fine."
She did not haggle. She did not cry. She walked out with a cashier's check and sat in her Camry in the parking lot for twenty minutes with her hands on the steering wheel.
Dominic met her at home. He took the check. He said, "I'll deposit it. It's already taken care of, honey." What he meant was: *You don't have to know what your mother's earrings were really worth. You don't have to carry that number.* He carried it for her. He would carry it alone for the rest of his life.
They borrowed the last eighty thousand from two old friends. A retired teacher named Ben. A widow named Marlene. Dominic signed IOUs on printer paper at their kitchen tables. His hand shook on the second signature. Marlene put her hand over his and said, "Bring her home, Dom." He nodded because he could not speak.
---
The wire went through at 4:47 PM on Thursday.
Dominic sat at the kitchen table afterward with the bank statement printed out in front of him. The balance line at the bottom read $214.37. He stared at it. Greta stood behind him with her hand on his shoulder. Neither of them spoke.
They had done everything they could do.
Now they waited.
---
Gavin watched the transfer confirm at 4:47 PM.
I watched him watch it.
He was at the kitchen counter in the Belltown condo. The condo my parents' money had helped furnish. He had a scotch in his hand. He was wearing the charcoal suit. He'd loosened the blue tie. His laptop was open, and the little green checkmark appeared on the screen, and Gavin Daniels — my husband, the man who had once told me my lipstick made me look like I had secrets — leaned back against the counter and smiled.
He smiled the way a man smiles when he has won.
He raised the scotch. He said, softly, to no one, "There we go."
I closed the laptop.
I sat in the beige rental with the terrible coffee, and I did not move for a long time.
Then I picked up the burner phone.
And I texted Alicia.
*It's time.*
