and dreamed about fences — climbing them, falling from them, finding them
where fences shouldn't be — and woke before the alarm with his heart
hammering and the house silent around him.
Tom hadn't known it was coming. Marsh had deliberately not told him — "I
didn't want you watching the window," she'd said later. But Chloe had been
up early, restless the way she'd been restless for weeks, and she'd seen the
unmarked cars first, and she'd shaken Tom awake, and they'd stood together
at the living-room window — not the bedroom window this time, the living
room, in the open — and watched.
It was the quietest arrest Tom had ever witnessed, and he would remember
that about it: no sirens, no shouting, just the soft tick of cooling engines and
Marsh's unhurried walk up the driveway. Dawn was doing its slow pale work
on the rooftops. Somewhere a sprinkler clicked on, oblivious.
Two unmarked sedans and a marked unit pulled onto Diane's street just as
the sky was going pale. Marsh walked up the driveway with Okafor and two
uniformed officers, and she knocked, and after a long moment the door
opened, and there was Diane Holloway in a bathrobe, her blonde hair
uncombed for the first time in Tom's memory, Paul hovering behind her in
pajamas.
They couldn't hear the words from across the street. But they saw Marsh hold
up the warrant. They saw Diane's hand go to the doorframe. They saw Paul
step backward, away from her, and Tom felt something complicated twist in
his chest at that — the small, instinctive abandonment, the husband who had
agreed not to notice things finally noticing.
44
The neighbors came to their windows one by one, the way they had come to
watch Tom's backyard that Saturday. Mrs. Abernathy in her robe. The
Kowalskis. The whole street, watching the woman who had inspected every
one of them — their trash cans, their fences, their paint colors — being
walked to a police car in handcuffs.
Diane stopped at the curb. She looked across the street, directly at Tom's
house, and even from that distance Tom knew she had seen him in the
window. Her mouth moved. Tom couldn't hear it, but Chloe, who read lips
the way she read everything — closely, completely — said quietly, "She
said, 'This is Tom Beckett's doing.'"
On the street, Marsh was guiding Diane toward the car. And then Marsh
paused, and turned, and looked directly at Tom's window too — and Tom
would swear later that she knew exactly who was watching — and she said
something to Diane, clear enough that Mrs. Abernathy, two houses down
with her window cracked, heard every word and repeated it to the entire
street by noon.
"No, ma'am," Detective Marsh said. "This is yours."
The group chat started detonating at 6:40 in the morning, and Tom Beckett
read exactly eleven messages before he put his phone face-down on the
kitchen counter and went back to the pancakes.
Chloe sat at the island in her pajamas, hair in a knot, watching him with the
particular stillness she got when she was deciding whether to be scared or
angry.
"Is it about last night?" she asked.
45
"It's about everything," Tom said. "Eat."
He slid a pancake onto her plate. It was shaped like a blob. He had never
learned to make them round, and Chloe had stopped expecting round around
age nine, which was one of the small mercies of raising a kid alone after a
divorce — low standards, mutually agreed upon.
"Can I look?" she asked, nodding at the phone.
"No."
"Tom."
"Dad."
"Dad," she corrected, with the exaggerated patience of a twelve-year-old,
"I'm the one who filmed it. I think I'm allowed to read what people are saying
about the thing I filmed."
"You're allowed to eat pancakes," Tom said. "The internet will still be stupid
after breakfast."
She ate the pancake. But her eyes kept sliding to the phone, face-down and
buzzing faintly against the granite every thirty seconds, like a trapped insect.
By eight, the chat had split into two distinct species of message. The first
species was outrage at Diane Holloway — screenshots of the arrest,
someone's doorbell footage of the unmarked cars on Diane's street at dawn, a
blurry photo of Diane in a windbreaker being walked to a cruiser while her
blonde hair came undone in the wind. The second species was quieter and
meaner: questions about Tom. Why did he have so many cameras. Why was
his daughter filming. What kind of man keeps that much footage of his
neighbors.
Margaret Ellison, the HOA treasurer — a retired bookkeeper who had held
46
the office for six years mostly by being the only person willing to do the
math — posted at 8:14: Emergency board meeting tonight, 7 PM, clubhouse.
All residents welcome. Please keep this channel civil.
Someone replied within a minute: Civil left the neighborhood when the
president started planting syringes.
Tom turned the phone over, read that one, and almost smiled.
At nine, a local news van parked across from Diane's house, and Paul
Holloway came out in a bathrobe to get the paper. A reporter with a
microphone jogged up the driveway. Paul looked at her for a long moment,
the way a realtor looks at a house with foundation cracks — calculating
whether it's worth the trouble — and said, "No comment," and went back
inside. The clip ran on the noon broadcast. Tom watched it with the sound
off while Chloe did homework at the table, and he thought Paul Holloway
had the weary, cornered look of a man who had just discovered the exact
market value of his marriage.
On Monday morning, the GreenLine Landscaping trucks did not show up.
This was noticed before 8 a.m., because in Oakmont Estates the common
areas were mowed every Monday by GreenLine, and had been for three
years, and the absence of the trucks was the first visible crack in the routine
Diane had built. By nine, the entrance hedges were untrimmed. By ten,