That was the clever part of what he had done; he had not fabricated an injury, he had documented a real one and simply hidden how it happened.

But every digital photograph carries within it a quiet record of itself, the metadata, the time and the date and the device, written into the file whether the person taking it thinks about it or not.

And the original file of that photograph had been preserved, untouched, in a place Michael had entirely forgotten about: a family cloud storage account that he had voluntarily synchronized his own devices with years earlier, an account that I had paid for every single month and that he had authorized me to administer long ago and never once thought to disconnect.

People rarely notice the doors they leave open when they have decided that the person on the other side is harmless.