He pressed play.

He couldn't look away. Surflix didn't offer entertainment. It offered truth .

The video quality was poor, grainy, as if shot on a super-8 camera by a ghost. There he was—a scabby-kneed boy with his front tooth missing, circling the hot asphalt of the pool parking lot. He watched his nine-year-old self lay the bike against a fence, walk toward the gate, and never look back. The camera lingered on the bike for a full minute. Then, a stranger in a denim jacket walked up, threw the bike into the back of a pickup truck, and drove away.

His thumb hovered over the remote. He hadn’t thought about that bike in thirty years. It was a red Huffy he’d left at the town pool. He remembered the panic, the tears, his mother’s sigh. It was a memory he had buried under decades of adult clutter.

He sat in the dark for a long time, the blue light of Surflix casting his face in a ghastly glow.