I listened to him, and I thought about the memory cards with my address on them, and the replacement panel already labeled before the damage was fifteen minutes old, and the controller programmed with Naomi's address, and the message he would later be shown to have sent after a burglary, and I knew that his sentence was not a complete sentence. It was a fragment, a piece of a larger truth with the rest of it cut away. He had installed the equipment, yes. But he had installed it knowing where it pointed, knowing what it recorded, and knowing that every time Helen cut the power, he was the man who came back to turn it on again.
Simone did not argue with him. She wrote down what he said, and she photographed the laptop screen, and she photographed the list, and she photographed the controller, and she bagged the camera from the replacement panel with the same care she had used on the box from my roof. June stood beside Travis now, not touching him yet, but close enough that he understood he was not going anywhere, and Helen stood beside me, and Naomi's school address sat on a memory card in an evidence bag, and my kitchen sat on a live feed on a laptop in my driveway, and the morning that had started with red paint on my roof had become something I did not yet have words for.
What I did have, standing there with my hands finally steady, was a clear understanding of what Helen had done and why. She had not destroyed my solar panels because she hated them, or because she wanted to punish me, or because she was confused, as the company had wanted everyone to believe. She had destroyed them because they were the power source for a network that watched a sixteen-year-old girl through her bedroom window, that listed fourteen homes by their vulnerabilities, that had already helped rob three families, and that had turned my own house into the central relay for all of it. She had cut the power because cutting the power was the only way to make it stop, and she had done it four times because the company kept coming back, and she had used paint that marked the hands of anyone who touched the device because she wanted proof, and witnesses, and a record that could not be explained away as a voltage fluctuation.
Simone did not rush the rest of it, and I was grateful for that, because rushing would have made it feel smaller than it was. She photographed the list from both sides, and she photographed the controller with Naomi's address on its screen, and she placed each item in its own bag and wrote on each bag in the same neat hand that I had seen on the memory cards, only now the handwriting belonged to law enforcement and not to the people who had labeled our homes. June stayed beside the truck, and she kept Travis where she could see him, and the firefighters stood back from the panel now that their part of the work was done, and I stood in the middle of my own driveway feeling like a guest at a scene that belonged to me.
I kept returning to the numbers, because numbers were the only things that stayed still while everything else moved. Four cards with my address. Seven with Helen's. One with Naomi's school. Fourteen homes on the list. Eighteen feeds on the laptop. Three homes already robbed. Nearly four years of purchases from BrightCurrent to Meridian. I repeated them to myself the way I used to repeat account numbers at work when I needed to be sure I had them right, and each time I repeated them they seemed both too precise to be a mistake and too terrible to be a plan. But they were a plan. A plan has numbers. A plan has schedules and lists and labels. An accident does not write down which doors can be unlocked remotely.