Page 145 of A Better Man

“Annie, I have to go,” said Reine-Marie.

“I need to call Reine-Marie,” said Armand, reaching for the phone.

“I’ll call Annie.”

Jean-Guy got through, but Armand did not. After trying home, then the bistro, he finally reached her at Myrna’s.

“I saw it,” said Reine-Marie before he’d even spoken. “Don’t worry. No one believes it. It’s crude.”

“It’s cruel,” came a voice shouted in the background. “But I fixed it.”

Ruth, Armand recognized. “How did she fix it?”

“Armand?”

It was Jean-Guy’s voice. He had Annie on the line and was sitting once again at his laptop.

“Hold on,” said Armand, and he turned to his son-in-law. “What is it?”

“Annie sent me a link. Just posted.”

“The same one…?” Armand began to ask as he walked around to the laptop.

But he stopped, walking. Talking. Breathing.

The image frozen on the screen was clearly from the same raid on the factory. But this was a different video. It was, he could see immediately, from the original recording. The true record of what had happened that day.

It was never meant to be made public. Never meant to be seen outside the Sûreté and the official inquiry. But the video had been leaked and posted years ago, in a violation so profound it had taken Gamache, Beauvoir, the families, years to get over.

Scenes had obviously been taken from it to create the bastardized video that had gone up that morning.

Armand now knew how Ruth had “fixed” it.

Thinking she was helping a friend, she’d reposted the original. In hopes of showing the truth.

What the old poet didn’t realize, or had forgotten, was that social media was less about truth than perception. People believed what they chose to believe.

Neither did she appear to understand the damage she’d just done.

“I have to let you go,” Armand said into the phone.

When he hung up, he looked briefly at the clear image on the screen, taking one deep breath after another. Trying to control his outrage.

Then, reaching for the phone, he said to Jean-Guy, “Can you give me a few minutes?”

Jean-Guy stepped toward the door, paused, then turned around. He knew what Armand was about to do. “Non.”

“Non?”

“I’m staying with you.” He sat down. There would be no argument.

Jean-Guy did not leave his side as Armand called the families of the officers who’d been slain that day. Whose deaths, like some horrific snuff film, were once again played out in public.

Armand placed call after call.

They were numbers he knew by heart, since he spoke to the mothers, fathers, husbands, and wives every week and visited the families whenever he was invited.

Now he called to warn them. To listen to their rage. To absorb, again, their agony.