And the cameras had captured everything.
My name is Malcolm Reed.
I was forty years old, a single father, and the owner of a small but successful construction technology business based in Scottsdale, Arizona.
My company developed project-management software for commercial builders and property contractors. After years of working six-day weeks, I sold a majority interest in the business, stayed on as a consultant, and finally reached a point where I could spend more time raising my daughter.
I wasn't born wealthy.
My father worked as an electrician.
My mother was a nurse.
They owned a modest house outside Phoenix, drove used cars, and taught me that money was useful only if you understood what it could and couldn't buy.
It could buy security.
Comfort.
Opportunities.
But it couldn't buy character.
And it certainly couldn't make a person more deserving of respect than somebody earning an ordinary wage.
I had learned that lesson again and again.
Sometimes painfully.
My wife, Grace, understood it better than anyone.
She was a pediatric nurse with a laugh that could fill an entire room. She loved thunderstorms, old jazz records, and making elaborate birthday cakes even though she was terrible at decorating them.
She met me at a hospital fundraising event when we were both twenty-seven.
I was helping a contractor install temporary equipment for the event.
Grace was coordinating volunteers.
She mistook me for the person responsible for the sound system and demanded to know why the microphones weren't working.
I told her I had nothing to do with the microphones.
She apologized.
Then five minutes later asked me to help fix them anyway.
I did.
She bought me coffee afterward.
Three years later, we were married.
When Ava was born, Grace cried so hard the nurse assisting us had to remind her to breathe.
I remember looking at our daughter for the first time.
Her tiny fingers.
Her round cheeks.
Her beautiful dark eyes.
And feeling more frightened than I'd ever felt in my life.
Not because something was wrong.
Because suddenly I understood what it meant to love somebody whose happiness mattered more than my own.
Grace squeezed my hand.