I kept thinking about the contract as June waited for backup, because the contract was the part that reached inside my house rather than just onto my roof. A panel on a roof is one thing. A clause that reaches into my Wi-Fi is another. I thought about everything connected to that network, and the list made my hands shake in a way the morning cold had not. The security cameras I had installed to protect Ava. The phones we carried in our pockets. The door locks I had trusted to keep strangers out. The motion sensors in the hallway. All of them, according to that forty-seven-page version, were sources of data the company could collect, and I had never agreed to any of it. I had signed twelve pages at my kitchen table, back when Danielle was alive and the whole idea was about sunlight and savings, and somewhere between that table and this driveway, thirty-five pages had grown around my signature like ivy around a fence post, until the document no longer resembled anything I had read.
Travis would not look at me when I said that. He looked at the truck, at the roof, at the road, anywhere except at the homeowner whose name was on the tablet in his hand. June kept her voice level, but I could hear the change in it, the way an officer sounds when a routine call has become something she will have to explain to a supervisor later. She asked him again how he had known to come, and he gave her the monitoring center again, and the automatic alert again, and each time the answer sounded thinner, as if it had been worn down by being repeated. A monitoring center that detects a loss of output does not dispatch a man with a pre-labeled panel in under fifteen minutes from forty miles away. An automatic alert does not explain a printed label with my address already on it. The numbers would not fit together no matter how he arranged them, and I watched him arrange them anyway, patiently, like a man who believed that if he kept moving the pieces, eventually no one would notice the shape they made.
Helen watched him too, and I realized that she had expected all of this. She had expected Travis to arrive. She had expected the replacement panel. She had expected the refusal and the legal language and the talk of licensed infrastructure. That was why she had used the industrial marking paint that morning instead of the ordinary paint from the earlier incidents, though I did not yet know about the powder or the ultraviolet traces or the plan behind them. All I knew, standing there, was that Helen was calm and Travis was not, and that calmness belonged to the person who had prepared for this moment rather than the person who had been caught by it. She had climbed my roof knowing she would be arrested. She had sprayed the final panel knowing the police would come. She had waited beside the ladder, making no attempt to escape, because the arrest was part of the plan, and the plan required witnesses in uniform standing in my driveway when Travis arrived with his truck.
June's backup was on its way, and the minutes stretched in the way minutes stretch when everyone is waiting for someone else to move first. Travis kept one hand on the truck door, as if he might still drive away, and June kept herself between him and the road, not blocking him exactly, but making it clear that leaving would be a choice with consequences. Helen stood beside the ladder with her handcuffs on, and I stood on my own lawn feeling like the least informed person at a meeting about my own house. My roof had a camera under panel six. My home network had been feeding data to strangers. My contract had grown thirty-five pages without my knowledge. My neighbor had been protecting my daughter while I accused her, silently, of being a vandal. Every fact I had lived with for nearly two months had inverted itself in a single morning, and the inversion was not finished yet. The equipment case was still closed. The three transmitters were still inside it. And Travis Morrow, the man who maintained my system, was still standing in my driveway refusing to open it.