The list itself stayed in my mind more than anything else on that screen, because it was not written like a technical document. It was written like a guide for people who intended to walk into houses where they did not belong. A schedule tells you when a house is empty. A note about dogs tells you whether something will bark, and whether that barking will matter, and whether the dog is inside or outside when you need it not to be. A note about firearms tells you what you might find, and what you might face, and what you might take. A note about a remotely unlockable door tells you that you will not need to break anything at all, that the house will open for you the way it opens for its owner, and that the alarm, which depends on the same system, will stay quiet while you walk through rooms that belong to someone else. I had never thought of my own routines as information that could be used against me. I left for night shifts twice a week, and Ava stayed home, and the house locked itself behind us, and I believed that was safety. The list proved that someone had been reading my safety as an instruction.
I thought about the nights I had worked while Ava was home alone, and I thought about the way I used to check the hallway camera from my phone during a break, just to see the front door closed and the house quiet, and I realized that the same system that let me check on her had let someone else check on her too. I had bought the camera to protect her. I had connected it to the same network that carried the hidden feed. I had trusted the company that installed the panels, and the company that maintained them, and the technician who came to my house four times, and every piece of that trust had been used to build a clearer picture of when my daughter was alone. The green labels on the screen had not been guesses. They had been accurate because the people who wrote them had watched long enough to get them right.
Helen's seven cards stayed with me as well, because seven is more than four, and I understood what that meant without anyone having to explain it to me. Helen had been watched more closely than I had, and for longer, because she was the person who had noticed. She was the person who detected the signal at night, who followed the camera angle back to my roof, who kept damaging the array when no one else believed her. The people watching her had not only watched Naomi through the bedroom window. They had watched Helen herself, her routines, her movements, the hours when she was alone in the small blue house behind mine. They had written down her alarm code beside the video of her granddaughter's window, and they had kept watching even after she started fighting back, because a woman who fights back is also a woman you need to keep track of.
And then there was the card with Naomi's school address on it. I kept coming back to that one, because a school is not a house, and a sixteen-year-old girl going to class is not a schedule to be sold. Someone had followed a child beyond her home, beyond her grandmother's house, to the place where she spent her days, and had written that address on a card and filed it with the others, as if it were just one more location in a network. I thought about Naomi running across the yard later with a tablet in her hands, and I thought about the link she had received on her phone, and I thought about how young she was to be carrying all of that, and I understood why Helen had climbed onto my roof with a can of paint in her hand and refused to come down until the police arrived. When the people watching your granddaughter have her school address on a card, you do not write another email and hope someone reads it. You cut the power.
Travis stood through all of this without speaking again, and I watched him the way I had watched him when he first stepped out of the truck, only now I was not wondering who he was. I knew who he was. He was the man who had come to my house four times to repair what Helen broke, and each time he repaired it, the feeds came back, and the battery started counting again, and the network woke up again. He was the man who carried a case full of cameras and receivers and cards labeled with our addresses, and who called it a security division, and who could not answer when Simone asked what that division protected. He was the man who had a replacement panel already labeled with my address less than fifteen minutes after the damage, because he had been waiting nearby, because he had known what Helen would do, because he had done this before. His claim that he only installed equipment sounded thinner every time I turned it over in my mind, because installation is not a neutral act when you know where the lens points, and when you know whose window it faces, and when you come back again and again to put it back after someone tries to take it down.