I want to be precise about the timing, because the timing was the whole point. The damage had occurred less than fifteen minutes earlier. Helen had climbed onto my roof at 7:14, and June had arrived six minutes after my call, and Travis had arrived after that, all within a span of time so short that I could still feel the morning cold on my hands. BrightCurrent's nearest warehouse was forty miles away. Forty miles. I did the math in my head without meaning to, the way you do when a number does not fit. Even driving fast, even with no traffic, even with the panel already loaded and the truck already running, there was no possible way Travis could have learned about the damage, driven to a warehouse forty miles away, loaded the correct replacement panel, labeled it with my address, and driven back to my house in less than fifteen minutes. It was impossible. It was not close to possible. It was the kind of impossible that tells you the story you have been told is not the story at all.
The only conclusion that fit was the one June reached before I did, and Helen had already reached it long before either of us. He had been waiting nearby. He had been close enough to arrive within minutes because he had never been far away. He had the correct replacement panel already loaded because he had loaded it before the damage happened, or before Helen climbed the ladder, or before I even woke up that morning. He had my address on a printed label because he had known, in advance, which panel would need replacing. The panel was not a response to the damage. The panel was part of the plan for the damage, or part of the plan for the repair that was supposed to follow it, and the speed of his arrival was not efficiency. It was evidence.
June ordered Travis away from the truck. She said it clearly, in the voice officers use when they are not asking. Travis refused. He did not step back. He did not raise his hands. He simply refused, and his refusal had a shape to it, a legal shape, as if he had rehearsed that too. "This is private equipment owned by BrightCurrent," he said. He said it as if the words settled the matter, as if ownership were a wall June could not walk through.
I answered him before I thought about it, because the claim was so plainly wrong to me. "I purchased the system," I said. I had paid for those panels. I had signed a contract. I had watched the crew install them on my roof. They were mine in every sense that mattered to a homeowner standing on his own lawn.
Travis looked at me, and his answer was the first truly frightening thing he said that morning, because it was not angry and it was not defensive. It was calm, and it was certain, and it sounded like something he had said to other homeowners before me. "No," he said. "You purchased the electricity it produces." He let that sit for a moment, and then he finished the thought. "The equipment remains part of our managed network." I had never heard that before. Not in the sales pitch. Not in the installation. Not in any conversation I had ever had with BrightCurrent. I had believed I owned the system on my roof. Travis was telling me, on my own lawn, in front of a police officer, that I owned only the electricity, and that the equipment itself, the panels and the wiring and whatever was hidden underneath them, belonged to BrightCurrent and remained part of their managed network, whatever that meant.
Then Travis opened a contract on his tablet, and he held it out as if it proved everything he had just said. It bore my electronic signature. I could see my name on the screen, rendered in the smooth digital script that electronic signatures always have, and for a moment I felt a sickening doubt, the kind of doubt that makes you wonder if you signed something you do not remember signing. But then June asked to see it properly, and Simone would later confirm what I already knew in my gut, and the details came out one by one, each one worse than the last.