The fire department arrived while Simone was still photographing the case. They brought a roof ladder, and they set it against the house with care, as if the roof itself had become evidence. A firefighter climbed up, and June called up instructions, and I stood below watching a stranger handle the panels on my roof while my neighbor sat in handcuffs on my curb and a cybercrimes investigator photographed memory cards labeled with my address.
They removed panel six carefully, the way you would remove something fragile, and for a moment I thought they had found nothing, because the roof underneath looked ordinary, just brackets and wiring and the dark surface of the roof itself. Then the firefighter reached in and lifted out a black metal box, no larger than a paperback book, and held it up so Simone could see it. Even from the ground, I could see it did not belong there, too neat and clearly designed to stay hidden.
Simone took it with gloved hands and turned it slowly. A tiny lens extended through the mounting bracket, and when she angled it, I followed the line of it with my eyes, across the gap between our houses, to the second-floor window of Helen's small blue house. Naomi's bedroom window. The lens was aimed directly at it, with the precision of something that had been installed by someone who knew exactly what they were looking at and exactly what they wanted to see.
The box connected to my solar wiring, drawing power from the array itself, and inside it was a Wi-Fi bridge linked to the router inside my house. Simone explained it to me in plain terms, because she could see from my face that I did not understand the technical language, and I appreciated that more than I could say at the time. Through that bridge, the device had access to every smart system I owned. My garage door. My alarm. My daughter Ava's laptop. Even the indoor camera facing the front hallway, the one I had installed because I wanted to know when Ava got home safely. Someone had turned every piece of protection I had bought for my family into a window for themselves.
I thought about Danielle then, and I did not want to think about Danielle, not there, not in front of all these people. She had been alive when the solar system was installed. She had been the one who signed the papers with me, who had asked the installer questions I had not thought to ask. The thought that a camera had been sitting on our roof through her final year, through the hospital appointments and the tired walks to the kitchen, made my hands go cold. I pushed the thought away, but it stayed there, still waiting underneath everything else.
Simone disconnected the box from the wiring and set it on a cloth on the ground. Its indicator remained illuminated, a small steady light that should have gone out when the power was cut. She looked at it, and then at me, and she said the words with the calm of someone delivering a fact she already knew would be hard to hear.
"It has a battery."
"How long?" I asked.
"Approximately seventy-two hours."
Helen spoke then, from the curb, in the same calm voice she had used on the roof. "That's why I kept damaging the panels," she said. "Every time the power stopped, the battery countdown began." She paused, and I saw June glance at her, and I saw Simone glance at her, and I saw that both of them were listening now in a different way than they had been listening before. "BrightCurrent always came back before it reached zero."
I understood it then, all at once, the way you understand a pattern only after someone draws the last line of it for you. Helen had not been trying to destroy my property for the sake of destruction. She had been trying to starve a device of power, to run down a battery that kept resetting every time a technician arrived and repaired what she had broken. Four times she had climbed onto my roof. Four times she had bought us time. Four times the company had come back and started the countdown again.