"When you see this video, I will be gone," Quinn said into the little camera and watched her thumb jitter over the record button.
She did not smile. Her voice was even because she had practiced evenness until it stuck.
"Not gone the way they think," she added. "Gone enough that what I leave behind has to be found."
She looked past the lens at two granite stones that read ANNIE NING and ELLEN LEE. Her fingers trembled and the tremor showed on screen. She did not stop to apologize for it.
"Annie," she said, speaking like she could put a last thing straight between them, "you forged my life against me. You sold my name like it was a trinket. I don't want your pity or your phone calls. I want this to be clean."
She paused, the camera catching her swallowing hard. The swallowing was loud in the small recorded frame.
"You," she turned her face toward Ellen's grave, "you trusted me with a house full of designs. You left the original sketchbooks in my hands. I am giving them back the only way they'll be heard."
Quinn ran a fingertip over the edge of a slim folder beside her on the grass. The folder had a band of official stamps and a stack of copyright certificates. She had spent every quiet hour since the diagnosis signing for them, notarizing them, printing them with so many duplicates that her printer had quit on her twice
