Chapter Nine: What Eli Found

Eli's pov

I found Marcus Webb at the coffee shop on Fifth, the one he always studied at because he said the wifi was faster there than the library, and I'd been sitting across from him for ten minutes before I actually said what I'd come to say.

"You were at that party," I said. "Back in January. The one at Danny Ruiz's house."

Marcus looked up from his laptop like I'd startled him out of a different century entirely. "Yeah, I mean, I was there for like an hour. Why?"

"I need you to think back. Hard. Anything you remember from that night, especially anything near the bathroom in the back hallway."

His face did the thing I'd started to recognize over the last week, the careful, uncomfortable blankness of somebody who knew exactly what I was asking about and didn't want to be the one who answered it.

"Eli, man, that was months ago."

"I know how long ago it was."

"Why do you even care now? I thought you two were done." He said it gently, which somehow made it worse than if he'd said it careless.

I sat back in my chair and let out a breath I'd been holding since I walked in. I'd rehearsed a version of this conversation in my car on the way over, something calm, something that didn't give away how much this actually mattered, and none of it survived contact with an actual human face looking at me like I might be losing it.

"It matters," I said. "Trust me, it matters more than it used to. I'm not trying to start something with anyone. I just need to know what people saw."

Marcus glanced around the coffee shop like he was checking whether anyone was listening, which nobody was, and leaned forward with his voice dropped low.

"Look, I didn't see anything myself. I was outside most of the night. But I heard people talking about it after, you know how that stuff spreads. Somebody said they saw a guy go in after her, but it was dark back there, half the lights were busted, and everybody who was even near that hallway had been drinking since like eight."

"Nobody got a look at his face."

"Not that I ever heard. That's kind of the whole reason it turned into such a mess, right? If somebody had actually seen who it was, it would've just been a thing that happened instead of this whole mystery everybody kept talking about for weeks."

I nodded slowly, turning that over, the same dead end I'd been running into for a week straight. Every conversation ended the same way. Somebody heard something from somebody else, and at the bottom of every single thread was the same wall: nobody saw a face, nobody had a name, and the trail always went cold in the same spot.

"There's got to be something," I said, more to myself than to him. "Somebody has to actually know."

Marcus was quiet for a second, chewing on the inside of his cheek the way people do when they're deciding whether to hand you information they're not sure you should have.

"There's the cameras," he said finally.

"What cameras?"

"Danny's house backs up right onto the science building parking lot, you know that little strip of hallway that connects to the gym entrance? Campus security's got cameras covering that whole area for the parking lot, and I'm pretty sure the angle catches part of that back hallway too, because my buddy got busted skateboarding through there last year and they pulled footage on him."

My whole body went very still.

"You're telling me there might be actual footage," I said. "From that night."

"Might be. I don't know how long they keep that stuff, could be it's already gotten wiped by now, it's been months. But if it exists, campus security would have it, not the school itself."

I sat there with my coffee going cold in front of me, turning that piece of information over like it was something fragile, something that might disappear if I looked at it too hard. Footage. An actual recording, somewhere, sitting on a server, that could end six months of not knowing in the time it took to press play.

"Would they just let anyone request it?" I asked.

"No chance. You'd need a legit reason, and even then they're weird about handing footage over to students. My buddy had to get his parents involved just to get his skateboarding thing sorted out."

I thanked him, left more money on the table than the coffee cost, and sat in my car in the parking lot for a long time after he'd gone back inside, staring at the dashboard, running the math on how a nineteen year old with no legal standing and no good reason he could say out loud gets a college security office to hand over footage from ten months ago.

I thought about Jordan.

That was the part that kept catching in my chest every time I sat down to actually do this, the guilt that ran underneath every single step of this search like a current I couldn't turn off. He'd called me two days ago from a hospital hallway, his voice cracking on words like biopsy and stage three, and I'd dropped everything and driven there and held his shoulder and told him whatever he needed, I wasn't going anywhere. And the whole time, in some other part of my life, I was quietly trying to identify a stranger from a bathroom at a party, chasing down a mystery that had nothing to do with him, that couldn't possibly have anything to do with him, because Jordan was the one person in my entire life who'd never once given me a reason to doubt him.

It didn't feel like a betrayal exactly. I told myself that every time the guilt crept up. This had nothing to do with Jordan. This was about Mia, about the baby, about a stranger I'd never met and desperately needed a name for. But some part of me still flinched every time I thought about doing this search while his mother was upstairs in a hospital bed with a number attached to her that I couldn't stop hearing in my head. Three to four months. It felt obscene, somehow, to be spending my energy on a mystery from a party while my best friend was fighting for his mother's life two floors up from where I'd just been sitting.

I called him that night, mostly to check in, mostly to hear his voice and remind myself what actually mattered.

"How's she doing," I asked, the second he picked up.

"Tired. Sore from the port thing. She made a joke about the food being worse than my cooking, which honestly, fair." He let out a breath that sounded like it had been held too long. "Thanks for today, man. Seriously. You didn't have to sit there for four hours."

"Course I did."

"How's your day been? You sounded weird when you texted earlier."

I almost told him the truth right then. I almost said, I'm trying to find out who else Mia was with that night, there might be footage, I don't know what I'm going to do if I actually find it. The words sat right there in my throat, ready.

"Just dealing with some stuff," I said instead. "Nothing important. Get some sleep, man. I'll come by tomorrow."

I hung up and sat there in the quiet of my room, staring at the ceiling, thinking about a hallway with busted lights and a camera that might have caught more of it than anyone realized, and I made a decision right then that I was going to find a way into that footage no matter what it took, even if I had no idea yet what that would actually look like, and even less idea of what it would cost.