The Black Screenshot

Grant called again before I moved.

The phone vibrated against my desk, a small, polite sound that had no business making my skin tighten. His name lit the screen in soft white letters.

Grant Whitmore.

My husband.

The man whose hand had been on Serena's shoulder in the frame of my funeral.

I let it ring.

Rain crawled down the office windows in crooked lines. On my laptop, Amelia's vow renewal folder waited as if nothing had happened. Ivory roses. Guest access links. A grandmother in Boston.

No memorial card.

No coffin.

No Grant in black.

I clicked the refresh icon.

Nothing.

I typed my own name into the LumaLive search bar.

No results.

I tried my married name.

No results.

I tried the title exactly as I had seen it, every capital letter burned into my head.

EVELYN VALE MEMORIAL SERVICE

The dashboard returned a cheerful gray message.

No scheduled events found.

My phone stopped ringing.

For three seconds, I could hear only the rain and my own breathing.

Then Grant texted.

Grant: Evie, answer me.

A second message followed.

Grant: You are making me worry.

There it was. The sentence he used whenever he wanted me to feel guilty before I had done anything wrong.

I turned the phone face down.

Then I reached for it again.

Not to answer.

To prove I had not imagined the card.

I opened my recent apps. LumaLive still showed Amelia's folder. I swiped back, forward, sideways, every useless motion people made when panic turned them stupid. The memorial did not return.

"Think," I said aloud.

My tone sounded too steady. That scared me more than shaking would have.

Every livestream card had a trace. A thumbnail cache, a share link, a page token, a preview image stored somewhere before the interface cleaned itself up.

I knew that because I had spent five years building events around other people's last chances to look composed. LumaLive liked to pretend it was seamless. It was not. No platform was.

I opened my browser history.

There.

A LumaLive preview URL, timestamped 12:47 a.m.

My pulse kicked once.

I clicked it.

The page opened, went white, then gave me an error.

This event is unavailable.

I took a screenshot anyway.

The screen flashed.

The file saved to my desktop with the bland name Screenshot 2026-06-18 at 12.52.09 AM.

I opened it.

Black.

Not dark.

Not blurred.

Black, edge to edge, as if I had photographed the inside of a closed box.

I stared at it.

"No."

I took another screenshot of the error page.

Black.

I tried a screen recording.

The little red dot appeared in the corner. I reloaded the unavailable page, clicked the back button, opened history again, moved through every trace I could find.

When I stopped the recording and played it back, the video showed my cursor moving over a blank black screen.

My hands at last started to shake.

Grant called for the third time.

This time, I answered.

"Evie." His voice filled the office, low and warm and familiar enough to hurt. "Where are you?"

I looked at the black screenshot on my laptop.

"Still at work."

"At this hour?"

"A client changed her livestream request."

"You should have told Mara to handle it."

Not why are you scared.

Not what happened.

First, a correction.

I kept my voice even. "Mara left at nine."

Grant sighed in a low voice, the way he did when he wanted me to hear restraint. "Come home. The roads are ugly."

Roads. Rain. Home.

Ordinary words. Safe words.

I almost let them work.

"Did you need something?" I asked.

There was a pause, small enough that a kinder wife would have missed it.

"I need to hear my wife's voice."

The line should have warmed me. It used to.

Now I heard the possessive before the affection.

My wife's voice.

"You are hearing it," I said.

Another pause.

This one longer.

"Are you upset with me?"

Grant never asked questions he did not know how to use.

I turned the phone speaker on and placed it beside the laptop. Then I opened the screen recording file again, just in case the audio had caught anything I missed.

"Why would I be upset?"

"That is what I am asking you."

Soft. Patient. A man leaning down to coax a frightened animal out from under a table.

I watched the recording play its black silence.

"I am tired," I said.

"Then come home, sweetheart."

Sweetheart.

I looked at the browser history URL, copied it, pasted it into a blank document, and saved it under Amelia's folder. Not under my name. Not where Grant would think to look, if Grant was the kind of husband who looked.

"I will," I said.

"When?"

Too quick.

"Soon."

"Evie."

One word. Gentle warning.

I let the silence sit until he had to fill it.

"You are not yourself tonight," he said.

My fingers went still on the keyboard.

Not scared.

Not busy.

Not tired.

Not yourself.

A label, offered early.

I made my voice softer. "I said I will come home."

He exhaled. "Good. I left soup in the fridge. Do not drive if you feel shaky. Call me and I will send a car."

Send a car.

Another kindness with a handle on it.

"Good night, Grant."

He did not answer right away.

Then, gently, "I love you."

I looked at the black screenshot of my own funeral.

"I know."

I ended the call before he could hear what my silence meant.

The office fell quiet again.

I replayed the screen recording one more time. Black. Black. Black.

Then, at the end, after the unavailable page vanished, the audio track clicked.

For three seconds, Theo marked the file as not silent.

A man spoke through, muffled and close to a microphone.

Grant's voice.

"Do not let her see the process sheet."