The officer who brought us in took it from Arthur's jacket pocket during processing. I watched him hand it over, watched the way his throat moved as he swallowed, watched the officer drop it into a clear plastic evidence bag with the same indifference he'd shown my silver clutch. But the clutch is just a clutch. The camera is something else entirely.
Arthur hasn't looked at me since they closed the door. The room smells of stale coffee and disinfectant, and the walls are painted a colour that was probably meant to be calming but has faded into something closer to despair. There's a mirror on one wall that I know isn't a mirror, and somewhere beyond it, someone is watching us. I've spent enough time on film sets to recognise the particular flatness of two-way glass.
'Beatrice.'
Arthur says my name like he's testing the weight of it. I turn my head. His spectacles have slipped down his nose, and there's a smear of red dust on his left cheekbone from the canyon. He looks younger than he did this morning, or maybe just more exhausted. The fluorescent light isn't kind to either of us.
'I need to know something,' I say.
My voice comes out steadier than I feel. Inside my chest, my heart is still running at canyon-speed, the animal panic of those last moments before we abandoned the ranger truck still humming in my bloodstream. But my voice is calm. I learned that particular trick years ago, in auditions and press junkets and meetings with men like Marcus who wanted to see me crack.
Arthur shifts in his chair. 'Anything.'
'When you grabbed the camera from the truck. Before we ran. Were you thinking about me, or were you thinking about your subscribers?'
The word lands between us. Subscribers. All forty-seven of them. I know the number because he told me, somewhere in the Nevada desert, his voice half-laughing at his own absurdity. Forty-seven subscribers and eighty-three views on his last video. I remember the numbers exactly because he said them with such careful self-deprecation, the way someone touches a bruise to see if it still hurts.
Arthur's hand stops twitching. He stares at the camera in its plastic shroud, and I watch his face go through a series of expressions I can't quite catalogue – something flickering between defence and recognition and a rawness I haven't seen before.
'I wasn't thinking,' he says finally. 'That's the truth. I just grabbed it. Reflex.'
'Reflex.'
'Yes.'
'Like the reflex that made you film me at the petrol station? The footage Marcus is using to prove you kidnapped me?'
The words are out before I can soften them. Arthur flinches – a small movement, just a tightening around his eyes – but he doesn't look away. The camera sits on the table, its lens pointed at neither of us, and yet I feel it watching. I feel the weight of everything it's recorded, everything it represents.
'That was different,' he says.
'Was it?'
'I didn't know you then. I didn't know…' He stops, runs a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up in chaotic peaks. 'I didn't know anything. I was just some idiot with a YouTube channel and a desperate need for the world to notice I existed. You were a story. A headline. Content.'
The honesty of it hits me harder than a lie would have. I feel my jaw tighten, feel the familiar urge to retreat behind the mask I've worn for every red carpet and press conference. But I don't. I've spent two days not wearing it, and the thought of putting it back on makes my skin crawl.
'And now?' I ask.
'Now you're Beatrice.' He says my name differently this time – not testing it, but offering it. 'You're the woman who taught me that terrible coffee tastes better when you're drinking it with someone who's never had motel coffee before. You're the person who fell asleep against my shoulder somewhere in Nevada and talked in your sleep about a cabin in Maine. You're…'
'Don't.'
He stops. The fluorescent light buzzes. Somewhere down the corridor, a door slams.
'Don't turn me into content,' I say. 'Even beautiful content. Even the kind that sounds like a love story. I've been content my whole adult life. I've been curated and edited and posted and shared. I've been a brand. I've been a product. I've been Marcus's masterpiece.' I hear my voice crack on his name and push through it. 'I didn't run away from all of that so I could become someone else's project.'
Arthur's face does something complicated. His mouth opens, closes, opens again. The camera glints under the fluorescent light, and I watch him look at it – really look at it – for the first time since we sat down.
'I don't know how to be a person without it,' he says quietly. 'That's pathetic, isn't it? I don't know how to experience something without thinking about how I'll frame it, how I'll edit it, what the thumbnail will look like. I've been doing it for so long that I've forgotten there's another way to be.'
'There is.'
'I know.' He looks at me, and his eyes behind those spectacles are the bluest thing in this grey room. 'You've been showing me. For two days. The diner. The desert. The way you laughed when the petrol station attendant told us the meatloaf was an experience. I didn't film any of that. I didn't even think about filming it. I was too busy…'
He stops.
'Too busy what?'
'Being there. With you. Actually being there, instead of watching myself be there through a screen.'
I want to believe him. The wanting is a physical thing, a pressure in my chest that makes it hard to breathe. But the camera is still on the table, and Marcus is still out there, and somewhere on the internet, millions of people are watching grainy security footage and deciding that Arthur is a monster and I am a victim and neither of those things is true.
The door opens.
The officer who enters is not the one who brought us in. This one is older, with a face that looks like it's been carved from the same red rock as the canyon we just escaped. She carries a folder and two paper cups of water, which she sets on the table with the careful precision of someone who's done this thousands of times.
'Ms. Hart,' he says. 'Mr. Finch. I'm Detective Miller.'
She sits down across from us, and I feel the dynamic in the room shift. The camera is still there, still silent, still accusatory, but now there's a third pair of eyes on it. Miller's gaze flicks to the evidence bag, then back to us.
'Here's where we are,' she says. 'You're looking at charges related to the theft of a government vehicle, destruction of federal property, and a whole lot of traffic violations I won't bother listing. That's just the local stuff.' She opens the folder, though she doesn't seem to need to read from it. 'On top of that, there's an active investigation out of California regarding the alleged kidnapping of a high-profile individual. Your manager' — she looks at me –'has been very vocal about what he calls a relentless pursuit of justice. There's significant public pressure.'
'It wasn't a kidnapping,' I say.
'I'm not here to determine that. I'm here to process you on the local charges and coordinate with California on the rest.' She closes the folder. 'But I'll tell you what I see. I see two people who've been running for two days, who stole a park ranger's truck, who nearly drove it off a cliff. I see a camera full of footage that may or may not corroborate either of your stories. And I see a young woman who looks exhausted and a young man who looks terrified, and neither of you looks like a kidnapper or a victim.'
Arthur's hand moves. It's unconscious, I think – a reflexive twitch toward the evidence bag, toward the camera, toward the thing that has been his shield and his weapon and his purpose for so long that he doesn't know who he is without it.
I reach across the table and place my hand over his.
His fingers go still beneath my palm. I feel the slight tremor in them, the tension, the want. He looks at me, and I look at him, and the camera sits between us like a question neither of us knows how to answer.
'Put it down,' I say softly. 'Just for now. Just for this.'
I don't say what this is. The interrogation room. The charges. The choice we're about to have to make. The truth of what we are to each other, which is still so new and fragile that I'm afraid naming it will break it.
Arthur looks at the camera. Then at my hand on his. Then at my face.
Slowly – so slowly I can feel the effort it costs him, he withdraws his hand from the reach, turns it over beneath mine, and laces his fingers through my own. He doesn't reach for the camera. He doesn't even look at it.
'Okay,' he says.
Detective Miller watches this exchange with an expression I can't read. She pushes one of the paper cups toward me, the other toward Arthur.
'I'm going to give you two some time to think about your statements,' she says. 'When I come back, I need you both to be very clear about what happened and why. The choices you make in the next hour are going to determine what the next few years of your lives look like.'
She stands. At the door, she pauses, her hand on the handle.
'One more thing. Your manager has been demanding access to any evidence we collect. Including that camera.' She nods toward the evidence bag. 'I haven't made any decisions yet. But you should know that whatever's on there isn't just yours anymore.'
The door closes behind her with a soft click that sounds, in the silence of the room, like a lock turning.
I don't let go of Arthur's hand. His palm is warm and slightly damp, and I can feel his pulse through his fingertips, still too fast. Outside the room, somewhere in the station, a phone rings and someone laughs and the ordinary machinery of the world continues to turn.
'He's going to use it,' I say. 'Marcus. Whatever's on that camera. He's going to twist it into proof that you took me against my will.'
'I know.'
'The footage from the petrol station was enough to start a manhunt. This will be worse. Hours of us together. Hours he can edit however he wants.'
Arthur is quiet for a moment. Then he says, 'There's footage on there that could clear us, too. The desert. The drone. The canyon. If someone watches it all, in order, without cutting it up…'
'Who's going to watch it all? The news? The internet? They'll see what Marcus wants them to see. He's been doing this longer than you've been alive.'
The words come out harsher than I intend. Arthur's fingers tighten around mine, and I feel the slight recoil in his posture, the instinct to defend himself, to explain. But he doesn't. He sits with the silence, and I watch him struggle with it, and something in my chest softens despite everything.
'I'm sorry,' I say. 'That wasn't fair.'
'It was completely fair.' He exhales, a long breath that seems to deflate him. 'You've been managed your whole life. Manipulated. Controlled. And I showed up with a camera and a YouTube channel and a desperate need for the world to validate my existence, and I pointed my lens at you like you were a story instead of a person. You have every right to be angry.'
'I'm not angry.'
'You should be.'
'I'm tired,' I say. 'I'm scared. I'm sitting in a police station in Utah with a man I met two days ago, and I've never felt more like myself than I do right now. That's not anger. I don't know what it is, but it's not anger.'
Arthur turns in his chair to face me fully. His spectacles have slipped again, and without thinking, I reach up and push them back into place. The gesture is so intimate, so casual, that I feel the shock of it reverberate through both of us.
'The camera,' he says. 'What do you want me to do?'
It's not the question I expected. I thought he'd ask what we should do, or what the best strategy was, or how we could fight Marcus's narrative. But he's asking me what I want. Not as a celebrity. Not as a brand. As Beatrice.
I look at the evidence bag. The camera's lens stares back at me, a dark eye that has seen everything we've been through. The motel with its pink neon sign. The petrol station with its live bait advertisement. The desert at dawn, the rock pillars rising out of the sand like the bones of some ancient creature. Arthur's face in the golden hour light, looking at me like I was something more than a story.
'I want you to choose,' I say. 'Not the camera. Not the subscribers. Not the validation. I want you to choose what's real.'
The fluorescent light hums. The two-way mirror watches. Somewhere in California, Marcus is spinning his web, and somewhere on the internet, the world is deciding who we are without ever having met us.
But here, in this grey room, Arthur is looking at me with his earnest blue eyes, and his hand is still in mine, and the camera is still on the table, and the weight of the lens is the weight of everything we might become.
'I already have,' he says.
And for the first time since we walked into this room, I believe him.
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