It was a little after two o’clock. I was restocking the bread rack when the bell rang, and I looked up and saw the uniform.
It was Dale Harmon.
I’ve known Dale since he was eight years old. He used to come into my store every day after school and buy one root beer and a pack of baseball cards with change he’d counted out on my counter. Now he was forty-something, with gray coming in at his temples and a little belly pushing at his duty belt.
But he wasn’t smiling the way he usually did.
He took his hat off and held it in front of him with both hands.
“Afternoon, Miss Ruth.”
“Dale.” I put the loaf of bread down. “What brings you in?”
He looked around the store, like he was checking to see if anybody else was there. There wasn’t. Just the two of us and the hum of the coolers.
“Are you the owner who drove a woman and her son to the hospital on Tuesday?”
My heart jumped into my throat.
“Yes,” I said. “Is her son all right? Did something happen to Noah?”
He didn’t answer.
He just stood there and looked at me for a long moment. A long, strange moment. His eyes were red around the edges, like he hadn’t slept much.
“Dale,” I said. “You’re scaring me. Is that little boy all right?”
He cleared his throat.
“Ma’am,” he said quietly, “you need to watch your security footage. Then you’ll understand.”
My hands started shaking. I gripped the edge of the bread rack to steady myself.
“Why? What is this about?”
“I’d rather you just see it for yourself.”
“Dale Harmon, I’ve known you since you had a bowl haircut and a lisp. You tell me right now what’s going on.”
For the first time, a tiny bit of a smile cracked his face.
“The boy is fine,” he said. “I called the hospital before I came here. He’s doing great. That’s not why I’m here.”
My knees almost gave out with relief.
“Then why are you here?”
He turned his hat around in his hands.
“Somebody came into your store on Tuesday,” he said. “While you were gone.”
I thought about the receipt tape. The forty-three dollars. The crooked picture frame.
“Who?”
“Do you still have the camera recordings from Tuesday morning?”
“I… I suppose so. I’ve never actually looked at them. I don’t even know if the thing works.”
“Can we look?”
I flipped the sign on the door to “CLOSED.” I don’t think I had flipped that sign in the middle of a weekday in thirty years. Then I led Dale back to my little office behind the stockroom.
It’s not much of an office. A metal desk, a filing cabinet, a calendar from the feed store, and an old computer that hums like a refrigerator. A sticky note on the monitor says “SECURITY — PASSWORD: DANNY96” because I knew I’d never remember it otherwise.
Dale raised his eyebrows at the sticky note but didn’t say anything.
It took us almost ten minutes to figure out the software. It had been so long since I’d even turned it on that I’d forgotten how. Dale finally found the right folder, and the right date, and the right time.
He scrolled the little slider until the clock in the corner of the screen read 10:14 AM.
There I was.
A grainy, black-and-white version of me, grabbing my keys off the hook. And there was Jenna, holding Noah. And then both of us running out of the frame toward the back door.
The store sat empty.
Dale clicked the button to fast-forward. The clock spun. 10:20. 10:25. 10:30.
Then he hit play.
At 10:31 AM, the front door opened.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.