In a world of word against word, she always won, because she was certain and I was tired and the people around us had decided, long ago, to believe the confident voice over the exhausted one.

She had spent a lifetime learning that reality is negotiable, that what happened is simply whatever the most assured person in the room insists happened, and by that measure she had never lost.

But a camera does not negotiate.

A camera is not more or less confident than she is.

It cannot be stared down, or talked over, or reframed as the imagination of an overwrought young mother.

It simply holds, in cold and patient pixels, the exact thing that occurred, on a timestamp that does not care who owns the house.