When he finally closed the laptop, he didn’t wipe it. He put it back in the box, but this time he wrote on the outside:
“You’re the third person this year. What’s your story?”
No picture. No sound. Just a black square and his father’s frozen thumbnail.
Inside: one file. A video recording dated the week before his father passed away. But when Leo clicked it, Windows Media Player threw an error: “Missing codec. Unsupported graphics driver.”