The white BrightCurrent truck turned into my driveway while June was still writing in her notebook and Helen was still standing beside the ladder, and the first thing I noticed was that I had not called the company. I knew that with absolute certainty, because I had spent the morning shouting at Helen and then calling the police, and at no point had I picked up the phone to BrightCurrent. I had not called them after the first incident that week, either, or after any of the earlier ones in the way you might expect, because the repairs had always seemed to arrange themselves. But this morning, this Saturday morning, with red paint still wet on my panels and a police officer standing in my yard, I had definitely not called anyone at BrightCurrent. And yet here was their truck, turning in as if it had been summoned.
The driver stepped out before the truck stopped completely. That was the second thing I noticed, and it bothered me in a way I could not name at first. A man who is arriving for a routine job does not step out of a moving truck. A man who is arriving for a routine job parks, turns off the engine, gathers his tools, and walks over at a normal pace. This man moved like someone who had been waiting for a signal and had finally received it. He looked at the red paint on my roof, and then he looked at Helen in handcuffs, and then he said, in a voice that sounded more annoyed than surprised, "What did she do?"
It was Travis Morrow. I recognized him at once, the same technician who had repaired my system after each of the earlier incidents, the same man whose name I had just given to June. He was wearing the same kind of work clothes he always wore, and he carried himself the way he always had, like a man who belonged on my property and knew it. Only this time he did not belong, because I had not invited him, and June had not invited him, and Helen certainly had not invited him. He had invited himself, and the fact that he had arrived at all, at that exact moment, was the most suspicious thing I had seen all morning.
June asked him the obvious question, the question I was already asking in my head. "How did you know the system was damaged?" It was a fair question. It was the only question. Travis did not answer it cleanly. He said, "Our monitoring center detected a loss of output." He said it quickly, the way a person says a rehearsed line, and June did not let it pass. She pointed out the problem with it immediately. "The inverter is still connected," she said. She had been standing beside the electrical box. She had seen it. The system was damaged, yes, but the inverter was still connected, still part of the house, still doing whatever an inverter does when panels are covered in paint. A loss of output from painted panels was not the same as a system going dark, and Travis knew it.
He hesitated. I watched the hesitation happen on his face, a small pause, a recalculation, the look of a man choosing a different sentence after the first one failed. "We received an automatic alert," he said. That was his second answer, and it was no better than the first, because an automatic alert about what, exactly, and from where, and why would it bring a technician to my driveway within minutes of the damage, on a Saturday morning, without a phone call from the homeowner? Helen answered him before June could. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. "You received an alert because your transmitter stopped sending," she said. And Travis had no third answer ready for that one. He just stood there, beside his truck, looking at the roof and then at Helen, as if he were trying to decide which of us was the bigger problem.
Then he opened the rear of his truck, and that was when the morning stopped feeling like a neighborhood dispute and started feeling like something much larger and much more deliberate. Inside the truck was a replacement solar panel. Not a generic panel. Not a panel that could have belonged to any house on any street. It was panel number six, already carrying my address on a printed label. My address. Printed. Stuck to the frame. Ready to install.