Brenda Franklin’s faux empathy was the spark that kindled a fire, but it was her audacity to put a price tag on my past—selling joy, love, and innocence—that ignited an inferno. Her betrayal was a gut punch, but what truly boiled my blood was discovering how she’d disguised theft as tragedy, weeping over her own deceit with handcrafted tears.
Smoothly polished hallucinations hung on walls displayed a stolen intimacy, a falsehood she peddled shamelessly in the guise of “preserving legacies.” Yet there she sat, brazen behind her counter, until my confrontation shattered her facade, razing the edifice of lies she’d so carefully constructed.
Resurrecting my memories from the clutches of copyright infringements and slick maneuvers, the ensuing legal brawl was relentless but enlightening. Evelyn Reed’s strategic brilliance turned my fury into an articulated assault, offering no quarter.
Her deposition laid bare Brenda’s unethical web, ensuring that every stolen snapshot served as both evidence and indictment.
As I held the feeble offering of hush money in contempt, so too did I hold Brenda’s exploits, ensuring her fraudulent empire crumbled to ash. From its ruins, not only would retribution rise, but a bastion against future transgressions—compelling justice to echo in the crystallizing concept of “The Digital Trust.”
Each reclaimed and protected memory will tell a new story, a vindicating chronicle of how dignity, unlike memories, wasn’t for sale or compromise.
The Hollow Box: A Promise in Polished Chrome
The box was heavier than it looked. Not just in pounds, but in years. It was a banker’s box, bowing at the sides, its cardboard softened by decades in closets and attics. Inside lived my entire visual history before the age of digital. Super 8 reels of my dad mowing the lawn in shorts that were always too short, their silent, jerky movements a language I could still translate. Slides in carousels that smelled of warm plastic and dust, each one a square of captured sunlight from a life that was no longer mine. And photos, thousands of them, loose and in crumbling albums, their corners softened like river stones. My parents, young and laughing on a beach. My own gap-toothed school pictures. The only video of my mother, a few precious minutes at a wedding, telling a story with her hands.
“Are you sure about this, Sarah?” Mark asked, his hand resting on my shoulder. He stood in the doorway of my home office, watching me tape the box shut with the care of a bomb technician. Our son, Leo, now a lanky teenager who communicated mostly in grunts and memes, had no concept of this analog world. To him, a photo that didn’t exist on a cloud was a photo that didn’t exist at all.
“I have to be,” I said, pressing the tape down firmly. “It’s all just…decaying in there. What’s the point of having it if we can’t look at it? If Leo can’t see it?” I’m an architect. I spend my days creating structures meant to last, to hold people and their lives safely. This box felt like a collapsing building, and I was the only one with the blueprints to save it.
That’s how I found “Forever Frames.” It was a boutique digital conversion service downtown, nestled between a yoga studio and an artisanal cheese shop. The online reviews were glowing. The owner, a woman my own age named Brenda, had a story that resonated. She’d started the business after a fire destroyed her own family’s photos. Her bio was full of phrases like “preserving legacies” and “honoring the past.”
When I met her, she was exactly as I’d pictured. Soft-spoken, with kind eyes and an air of gentle competence. Her shop was clean and bright, all white walls and polished chrome equipment displayed behind glass. “We treat every project as if it were our own family’s,” she said, her hand hovering reverently over my box. “These aren’t just pictures. They’re your story.”
I felt a wave of relief so profound it almost buckled my knees. I had found the right person. She understood.
“I know this is a lot to ask,” I said, my voice thick with emotion I hadn’t anticipated. “The videos of my parents… they’re the only ones I have.”
Brenda met my gaze, her expression one of deep, genuine empathy. “I promise,” she said, her voice a soft vow. “They’re safe with me.”
The Call
It was a Tuesday, six weeks later. I was at my drafting table, sketching the lines for a new community library, when my phone buzzed. It was Brenda. I smiled, assuming it was the call to tell me my newly digitized life was ready for pickup.
“Sarah?” Her voice was wrong. It was thin, tight, and frayed at the edges.
“Brenda? Is everything okay?” I put my pencil down. A cold knot formed in my stomach, the kind you get right before you hear the news you can’t unhear.
“There was… an incident, Sarah. I am so, so sorry.” The apology came before the crime. A classic defensive maneuver. “We had a catastrophic server failure last night. A power surge. It fried the primary drive and the backup.”
The silence on my end was absolute. The sounds of the office—the clicking of keyboards, the low hum of the plotter—faded into a dull roar in my ears. I stared at the half-finished library on my desk, a building of ghosts.
“What does that mean, Brenda?” I asked, my voice flat. I knew what it meant.
Then came the tears. A flood of them, crackling over the phone line. “It’s all gone, Sarah. We’ve been working with a data recovery team all morning, but… it’s unrecoverable. Your files, the original photos and tapes that were still awaiting final scanning… everything.” She was sobbing now, great, heaving gasps. “I am so sorry. I don’t know what to say. Of course, we’ll refund your deposit in full. I… I’m just devastated for you.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My throat was a solid column of cement. My mother’s hands, telling her story. My dad’s goofy shorts. Gone. Erased by a power surge. An accident.
“Sarah? Are you there?”
I hung up. I didn’t slam the phone down. I just gently pressed the red icon on the screen. I sat there for a long time, staring at my own hands on the drafting table. They felt empty. Mark found me like that an hour later, my face pale, my eyes fixed on nothing. When I finally told him, the words came out like shards of glass. He held me, but it was like trying to comfort a statue. The box, once so heavy with life, had been replaced by a hollowness that was infinitely heavier.
A week later, a check for my deposit arrived in the mail with a handwritten card from Brenda, full of more apologies, tear-stains dotting the ink. I threw it in a drawer and tried to forget the name “Forever Frames.”
A Year of Ghosts
Grief is a funny thing. It’s not a constant state of sorrow. It’s a series of ambushes. For the next year, my memories, or the lack thereof, became landmines in the landscape of my daily life.
On what would have been my dad’s seventieth birthday, I found myself telling Leo about the time my dad tried to build a treehouse and ended up accidentally nailing his sleeve to the trunk. Leo smiled, a polite, detached smile. I wanted to show him the picture—the one of Dad looking utterly defeated, hammer in hand, a look of pure slapstick comedy on his face. But I couldn’t. The image in my head was a high-resolution file; the reality was a 404 error. The story fell flat, a punchline without a setup.
At Christmas, my aunt mentioned my mom’s legendary gingerbread cookies. “Oh, you have to show Leo that video from ’98,” she said. “Your mom with flour all over her nose, singing off-key to Bing Crosby.” The words were a physical blow. I just nodded and changed the subject, a fresh wave of that hollow feeling washing over me.
Mark tried to help. He bought a state-of-the-art digital photo frame and filled it with pictures from his side of the family and our own digital-era photos. It was a kind gesture, but every time I walked past it, the cycling images only highlighted what wasn’t there. Our life, it seemed, had only begun in 2005. Everything before that was just a story, a rumor.
I stopped telling the old stories. It hurt too much to conjure the images in my mind, knowing they existed nowhere else. I became an archivist of a library that had burned to the ground. The loss wasn’t a sharp pain anymore. It was a chronic condition, a dull ache in the background of everything.
The empty space on the top shelf of the office closet where the banker’s box used to be became a kind of shrine. I never put anything else there. It was a monument to the ghosts, a testament to the fact that you can’t just erase a person’s history without leaving a scar. Brenda’s name, her tearful apology, her “devastation”—it all faded into the background noise of a bad thing that had happened once. An accident. An unavoidable tragedy.
The Face in the Ad
It was another Tuesday, almost a year to the day of the phone call. I was doing what everyone does late at night: mindlessly scrolling through a news site on my laptop, the blue light painting my face in the dark living room. Mark was already asleep. The house was quiet.
An ad popped up in the sidebar. It was for a life insurance company. “Protect Their Future,” the headline read. The image was meant to be evocative, a black-and-white photo designed to pull at the heartstrings. It showed a man’s hands, strong and gentle, placing a bandage on a little girl’s scraped knee. The girl, who couldn’t be more than six, was looking up at him with a mixture of pain and absolute trust. Her hair was in two messy pigtails, one slightly higher than the other.
I almost scrolled past it. It was just another piece of digital noise. But something made me pause. The girl’s pigtails. My mom could never get my pigtails even.
I leaned closer to the screen. My heart began to beat a frantic, panicked rhythm against my ribs. The girl was wearing a sundress with a familiar daisy pattern. I had hated that dress. It was itchy.
My breath hitched.
I zoomed in, my fingers trembling on the trackpad. The image pixelated, but it didn’t matter. I knew that face. I knew the tiny scar above her left eyebrow from a run-in with a coffee table. I knew the determined set of her jaw, even as tears welled in her eyes.
Because that little girl was me.
And the hands, the strong, gentle hands that had always been able to fix anything, belonged to my father.
A wave of nausea and white-hot rage crashed over me. This wasn’t some generic, heart-warming stock photo. This was a moment. A real moment. I remembered it. The sting of the asphalt on my knee after a spectacular fall from my bike. The smell of his Old Spice aftershave as he leaned in to fix the damage. It was a Tuesday then, too.
“Protect Their Future,” the ad mocked.
My future had been protected. My past had been stolen, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder. The server crash. The tearful apology. It was all a lie. A carefully constructed, sympathy-milking, goddamn lie.
Brenda didn’t lose my memories. She monetized them.
The Digital Trail: Reverse Image Search
The architect in me took over. Rage is a chaotic force, but my mind works best with lines, grids, and evidence. I needed a blueprint of the crime.
I took a screenshot of the life insurance ad. My hands were shaking so hard I had to do it three times to get a clear image. I saved the file to my desktop, naming it “Theft.jpg.” Then I opened a new browser tab and navigated to a reverse image search engine. I dragged the file into the search bar and hit enter.
The initial shock was a tidal wave. The results that flooded the screen were the tsunami that followed.
It wasn’t just the life insurance ad. My scraped knee was apparently a versatile marketing tool. It was on a blog post titled “Five Tips for Resilient Parenting.” It was the banner image for a pediatric clinic in Ohio. It was a thumbnail for a YouTube video about childhood resilience.
And then, I clicked on one of the source links. It took me to a massive stock photo website, a glossy, corporate behemoth called “ImageSource.” And there it was. My pain, my childhood, my father’s love, all neatly categorized. The title was “Fatherly Care.” The keywords included: *family, love, childhood, nostalgia, safety, comfort, Caucasian, authentic*.
The price was listed right there. Fifty-nine dollars for a standard license. Four hundred and ninety-nine dollars for an extended license that allowed for unlimited reproduction.
My life had a price tag.
I started clicking through the “Related Images” section. It was like a nightmare version of my own family reunion. There was the photo of me and my brother on a swing set, laughing so hard my eyes were squeezed shut. It was now titled “Carefree Summer Days.” There was a picture of my mother, her face tilted toward the sun in our backyard, a serene smile on her face. That one was called “Peaceful Contemplation.” They had stolen her peace and sold it.
Each click was a fresh stab of betrayal. This wasn’t just one photo. Brenda had taken everything. She’d sifted through the most intimate, sacred moments of my family’s life and curated them for mass consumption. My history had been rebranded as “content.”
The Watermark
Proof. I had the photos, but I needed an undeniable link back to Brenda and “Forever Frames.” I couldn’t just march into a lawyer’s office with a handful of screenshots and a story. I needed a smoking gun.
I went back to the ImageSource website and started examining the contributor profiles. The photos were all uploaded by a user named “NostalgiaVibes_78.” The profile was anonymous, of course. No name, no location, just a generic bio about “capturing authentic, slice-of-life moments.” A lie layered on top of a theft.
For hours, I scoured the internet, cross-referencing that username, looking for any slip-up, any connection. Nothing. It was a digital ghost.
Frustrated, I went back to digging through my old emails. I searched for Brenda’s name, for “Forever Frames.” I found our initial correspondence, the invoice, the contract I’d signed. I read through the fine print, my blood running cold at the irony of the “Care and Handling” clause.
And then I saw it. At the bottom of the invoice, a small, almost throwaway line itemizing the initial setup. “Digital Asset Organization: Project ID BF-SC-1982.”
BF. Brenda Franklin. SC. Sarah Connolly. 1982. The year I was born. It was her internal filing system. A cold, efficient little code.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I went back to the stock photo site. I started looking at the file names of the images available for download. They were all generic strings of numbers. But on a smaller, less professional-looking blog that had used my swing set picture, the web developer hadn’t bothered to rename the file they’d downloaded. It was still there in the source code of the page.
`img src=”…/BF-SC-1982_swing-set_04.jpg”`
I stared at the screen, a low, guttural sound escaping my throat. It was her. It was her code. She hadn’t even bothered to cover her tracks properly, probably assuming no one would ever look this closely. She’d underestimated me. She saw me as a grieving daughter, a sentimental fool. She didn’t see the architect who lives for details, who knows that the strength of a structure is in its smallest, most overlooked connections.
I had her.
A Conversation with Mark
I didn’t sleep. When the sun started to filter through the blinds, I was still at my laptop, my eyes burning, a spreadsheet of URLs and file names open on the screen. Mark came downstairs to make coffee and stopped dead when he saw me.
“Sarah? What in God’s name happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Ghosts,” I corrected him, my voice hoarse. “An entire army of them. And they’re for sale.”
I turned the laptop toward him and explained. I walked him through the ad, the reverse image search, the stock photo sites, the file name. With each new piece of evidence, his face hardened, his initial sleepy confusion transforming into a mask of cold fury. He wasn’t a man given to loud outbursts. His anger was a quiet, dangerous thing. He just stood there, his hand gripping the back of my chair, his knuckles white.
“That… that woman,” he said, his voice low and tight. “She cried on the phone to you.”
“I know,” I said. “She probably practiced it.”
He paced the length of the kitchen, a caged tiger. “So what do we do? We call her. We scream at her. We…” He trailed off, running a hand through his hair. “What can we do?”
“I don’t want to scream,” I said, and the calmness in my own voice surprised me. The initial rage had burned away, leaving something harder and more focused in its place. “Screaming lets her off the hook. It makes it about emotion. This isn’t just an emotional slight, Mark. She didn’t just hurt my feelings. She committed fraud. She committed copyright infringement on an industrial scale. She built a business on the bones of my family.”
He stopped pacing and looked at me. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m not going to be a victim,” I said, closing the laptop. “I’m going to be a plaintiff.”
The ethical part of it started to gnaw at me then. What did justice look like? Was it just about money? Could any amount of money replace what she had taken? No. But it could take away what she had built from it. It could dismantle her life the way she had dismantled mine. The thought was both terrifying and deeply satisfying. It was a moral crossroads I hadn’t asked to be at, but here I was.
“Okay,” Mark said, his voice firm. “Okay. What’s the first step?”
“First,” I said, a plan solidifying in my mind. “I’m going to pay Brenda a visit. I want to see her face when she realizes the ghost she’s been selling has come back to haunt her.”
The Rabbit Hole
Before I went to see her, I had to know the scale of it. I had to know exactly how much of my life she was peddling. That night, with a fresh pot of coffee and a grim sense of determination, I went back down the rabbit hole.
I used the project ID I’d found—BF-SC-1982—as a search term on every stock image platform I could find. It was a long shot, but my gamble paid off. On two of the smaller, less secure sites, her lazy file-naming convention hadn’t been scrubbed. A list of her uploads appeared, all under the “NostalgiaVibes_78” account.
There were 312 images. And 14 video clips.
I opened a new spreadsheet and began to catalog my stolen life.
Row 1: Image: Me, age 4, covered in mud, holding a frog. Title: “Curious Child Exploring Nature.” Use: Ad for organic children’s soap.
Row 2: Image: My parents slow-dancing in the living room, blurry and candid. Title: “Enduring Love.” Use: Banner for a marriage counseling website.
Row 3: Video Clip: My brother, Leo’s namesake, taking his first steps, stumbling into my father’s arms. 15 seconds of wobbly, triumphant babyhood. Title: “First Steps, A Milestone Moment.” Use: B-roll in a pharmaceutical ad for a new arthritis medication.
My hands grew numb as I typed. Each entry was a fresh violation. She hadn’t just picked the good ones. She had picked the most vulnerable ones. The ones that felt like they had been taken with a scalpel from my soul. My brother’s first steps, a moment my parents had treasured, now being used to sell pills to seniors. The irony was so grotesque it was almost poetic.
I worked through the night, the spreadsheet growing into a meticulous record of the desecration. I saw my mother’s last Christmas, her face thin but her smile bright as she opened a gift. Brenda had titled it “Holiday Hope.” I felt a rage so pure and so potent it made me dizzy.
This wasn’t just business. This was personal. This was a violation of the most sacred kind. She hadn’t just seen images; she had seen a narrative, a family, a life full of love and pain, and she had plundered it for keywords. *Authentic. Nostalgic. Family.*
By the time the sun came up, I had a complete dossier. Three hundred and twelve pieces of my past, scattered across the digital universe like ashes in the wind. But now I had a map. I knew where every single one had landed.
I closed the spreadsheet. I had my evidence. I had my anger. Now, it was time for the confrontation.
The Confrontation: The Drive Downtown
The forty-minute drive to Brenda’s shop felt like a journey to a different planet. The world outside my car window seemed impossibly normal. People were jogging, walking their dogs, heading to work. They lived in a world where their memories were their own. I felt like I was operating on a different frequency, a low hum of fury vibrating just beneath my skin.
I had rehearsed it a dozen times in my head. What would I say? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I just stand there and let the silence indict her? Each scenario felt inadequate. How do you articulate a violation so profound? It was like trying to explain the color red to someone who has only ever seen in shades of gray.
My architect brain kicked in again, trying to impose order on the chaos. I needed a strategy, not just a reaction. I wouldn’t go in hot. I’d go in cold. I would use her own tactics against her—the veneer of polite, professional calm. I would corner her not with emotion, but with facts. Indisputable, un-spinnable facts.
As I pulled into a parking spot across the street from “Forever Frames,” I saw her through the large front window. She was laughing with a customer, an elderly man holding a shoebox. She touched his arm reassuringly, her face a perfect mask of empathy and kindness. The same mask she had worn for me.
My heart didn’t pound. It didn’t race. It settled into a slow, heavy, deliberate beat. Like a drum before a battle. I turned off the ignition, took a deep breath, and got out of the car. It was time.
The Canvas on the Wall
The bell above the door chimed a cheerful, melodic greeting as I walked in. It was the same sound I’d heard the day I’d entrusted my life to the woman standing behind the counter. The shop was just as I remembered it: sterile, bright, and smelling faintly of lemon cleaner and new technology.
Brenda looked up, her customer-service smile already in place. It faltered for a microsecond as she recognized me. A flicker of something—confusion? annoyance?—crossed her face before being professionally plastered over.
“Sarah! What a surprise. How are you?” she asked, her voice oozing a practiced warmth that made my stomach turn. The elderly man beside me smiled, assuming I was another satisfied customer.
I didn’t answer her question. Instead, my eyes locked on a massive canvas print hanging on the main wall behind her. It was the centerpiece of her showroom, a beautiful, high-quality photograph of a family laughing in a park on a sunny afternoon. A father is pushing a little girl on a swing. A mother looks on, her head thrown back in a joyful laugh.
It was one of mine.
My throat tightened. It was from a family picnic in 1989. The girl on the swing, her pigtails flying, was me. The man pushing me was my father. The laughing woman was my mother. It was one of the last photos taken before she got sick. One of the last moments of pure, uncomplicated joy. And it was hanging here, a thirty-by-forty-inch lie, as an advertisement for her business.
I walked slowly toward it, my heels clicking on the polished concrete floor. The sound seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet shop. I could feel Brenda’s eyes on me, her smile becoming strained.
I stopped directly in front of the canvas and stared at it for a long moment. I let the silence stretch, thick and uncomfortable. The elderly customer shuffled his feet.
“This is a lovely photo,” I said, my voice clear and steady, loud enough for everyone in the small shop to hear. I ran my fingers lightly over the canvas, over the ghost of my mother’s face. “It’s so… authentic.”
“That Little Girl is Me”
Brenda forced a laugh. It was a brittle, glassy sound. “Thank you. We think it really captures the essence of what we do here. Preserving those joyful family moments.”
She was still playing the part. It was breathtaking, really. Her commitment to the fiction.
I turned from the canvas to face her. I looked past her to the small television screen on a side counter, playing a looped video montage of happy family scenes. A little boy with blond curls was taking his first wobbly steps on a lawn, his face a perfect picture of concentration and triumph.
I pointed to the TV. “That one, too. A real heart-warmer.”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes darting between me and the other customer, sensing the shift in the atmosphere. “We source our display images from a variety of stock photo agencies. We want to show our clients the possibilities.”
I took a step closer to the counter, my hands resting flat on the cool surface. I leaned in slightly, my voice dropping but losing none of its carrying power.
“I’m just wondering where you got them,” I said. “Because that little girl on the swing with the pigtails?” I gestured back at the giant canvas. “That’s me. That’s my father pushing me. And that’s my mother, who died of cancer a year after that picture was taken.”
The color drained from Brenda’s face. Her professional smile didn’t just fade; it shattered. The elderly man’s jaw went slack.
I wasn’t finished. I pointed to the TV screen again, where my nephew’s first steps were still looping. “And that video you’re showing on that TV screen of a little boy’s first steps? That’s my son, Leo. You told me you lost it all in a server crash.”
Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. She looked like a fish gasping for air.
“You didn’t lose my memories, Brenda,” I said, my voice as cold and hard as the concrete floor. “You stole them. You stole my parents’ faces and my son’s childhood. You stole them, and you sold them.”
The cheerful little bell on the door might as well have been a funeral toll. The lie was dead. And we were all standing in the wreckage.
The Aftermath in the Street
I didn’t wait for her response. There was nothing she could say that I wanted to hear. I turned my back on her gaping, horrified face and walked out of the shop. The cheerful bell chimed my exit.
The air outside felt cool and clean on my hot face. My legs felt shaky, the adrenaline of the confrontation draining away, leaving a strange, vibrating emptiness behind. I had done it. I had said the words. I had pulled the pin from the grenade and rolled it onto her polished floor.
I leaned against the brick wall of the building next door, taking deep, ragged breaths. I felt a hand on my arm and flinched, spinning around.
It was the elderly man from the shop. He was holding his shoebox of photos to his chest like a shield. His face was pale and his eyes were wide.
“I… I overheard,” he stammered. “My wife… she passed last year. These are… these are all I have left of her.” He looked down at the box, then back up at me, his expression one of dawning horror. “Is she… did she really…?”
I just nodded. I didn’t have the words to comfort him. My own wound was too fresh.
He fumbled in his coat pocket and pulled out a business card. He pressed it into my hand. “My daughter,” he said, his voice trembling with a fury that was now matching my own. “She’s a lawyer. A damned good one. You should call her.”
He looked at me, his eyes full of a shared, sudden, and sickening understanding. “She did it to me, too, didn’t she? She was going to steal my Helen.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and walked quickly down the street, clutching his shoebox of memories, a man who had narrowly escaped the same thief who had robbed me blind.
I looked down at the card in my hand. “Evelyn Reed, Attorney at Law. Reed & Associates.”
It wasn’t just my fight anymore. The thought didn’t bring me comfort. It brought me a cold, clarifying resolve. This wasn’t just about getting my memories back, which was impossible. This was about making sure Brenda never got her hands on anyone else’s again.
The Price of a Memory: Meeting the Lawyer
Evelyn Reed’s office was the polar opposite of “Forever Frames.” It wasn’t a place of polished chrome and curated sentimentality. It was a place of purpose. The furniture was old, dark wood, scarred with the marks of time and hard work. The shelves were crammed with thick legal books, not empty promises. The air smelled of old paper and strong coffee.
Evelyn was in her late fifties, with sharp, intelligent eyes that seemed to miss nothing and a no-nonsense haircut that matched her demeanor. She listened to my story without interruption, her fingers steepled under her chin. I laid it all out for her: the initial meeting with Brenda, the phone call, the ad, the reverse image search, the file names, the spreadsheet I’d meticulously compiled, and the confrontation in the shop.
When I finished, she was silent for a long moment, her gaze fixed on the dossier I’d slid across her desk.
“Well, Ms. Connolly,” she said finally, her voice dry as dust. “In twenty-five years of practicing law, I have seen some truly inventive forms of human awfulness. But this… this is a new wing in the museum.”
She flipped through my spreadsheet, her eyes scanning the URLs and the titles Brenda had assigned to my life. A muscle twitched in her jaw. “She didn’t just steal your property. She stole your narrative. And she did it with a smile and a phony tear.”
“So what can we do?” I asked, leaning forward. “I don’t even know what to ask for. How do you put a price on this?”
“You don’t,” Evelyn said, her expression hardening. “That’s her game, not ours. We don’t sue for the ‘value’ of the photos. That’s a trap. They’re priceless to you and worthless to a court. Instead, we sue her for what she understands. We sue her for fraud, for breach of contract, and for willful copyright infringement for every single one of these 312 images and 14 video clips. We go after statutory damages. We calculate every single time one of your photos was sold or used, and we attach a penalty to it that will make her ears bleed.”
She looked me straight in the eye. “This won’t be about making you whole, Sarah. That’s impossible. This will be about taking her apart, piece by piece, using the law as our crowbar. Are you prepared for that? It will get ugly.”
“She used a photo of my dead mother to sell her services,” I said, my voice quiet. “It’s already ugly.”
Evelyn nodded slowly, a thin, grim smile touching her lips. “Good. Then let’s get to work.”
The Deposition
The deposition took place in a sterile conference room in Evelyn’s building. It was the first time I had seen Brenda since the confrontation. She sat across a long, polished table, flanked by a slick, expensive-looking lawyer. She wouldn’t look at me. She had tried to recapture her old persona—the soft sweater, the gentle expression—but it didn’t fit anymore. It hung on her like a borrowed coat, two sizes too big. She looked smaller, diminished, the light behind her eyes extinguished.
Evelyn was relentless. She walked Brenda through every step of the deception, her questions like a series of precise, surgical cuts.
“Ms. Franklin, when you called my client on October 17th of last year, did you tell her there had been a server crash?”
“Yes,” Brenda whispered, her eyes fixed on her hands.
“And was there, in fact, a server crash?”
Brenda’s lawyer interjected. “My client will assert her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.”
Evelyn smiled, a predator’s smile. “Of course she will.”
She then projected one of my photos onto a large screen at the end of the room. It was the one of my dad and me, the skinned knee. “Ms. Franklin, do you recognize this photograph?”
Brenda flinched, a small, involuntary movement. “I…”
“It was uploaded to the ImageSource stock photo website by the user ‘NostalgiaVibes_78’ on September 30th of last year, two weeks *before* your alleged server crash. Can you explain that discrepancy?”
Silence.
The questioning went on for hours. Evelyn presented the file names, the invoices, the trail of digital breadcrumbs I had found. Brenda’s defense crumbled. Her lawyer objected and advised her not to answer, but the sheer weight of the evidence was suffocating.
Finally, near the end, Evelyn leaned back. “Why, Ms. Franklin? Why would you do this? My client trusted you with the most precious things she owned.”
For the first time, Brenda looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and a single tear traced a path down her cheek. It wasn’t the practiced, performative tear from the phone call. This one looked real.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I was going to lose everything. The business was failing. The loans… I started it for the right reasons, I swear I did. I wanted to help people. But the overhead, the equipment… I was drowning.”
She looked at me then, a desperate, pleading look. “They were just sitting in a box. They were old photos. I didn’t think… I just saw them as data. As assets. I told myself I was giving them a new life.”
I stared back at her, my face a mask of stone. Data. Assets. She had looked at my mother’s face, my son’s first steps, my father’s love, and seen a product to be liquidated. There, in that moment, was the ethical chasm between us. It wasn’t about money or desperation. It was a fundamental failure of her humanity. She had lost the ability to see the soul in the image.
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