Travis said nothing. He stood there on my driveway with his equipment case at his feet and his silence filling the space where an answer should have been, and I realized that silence was the answer. He had known. He had known what the cameras were for, and he had kept installing them, and he had kept replacing them every time Helen cut the power, because someone paid him to, and the money had been enough to quiet whatever part of him might once have objected. I thought about the times Travis had come to my house, always polite, always efficient, always with a clipboard and a explanation that made sense at the time. Inverter software updates. Routine maintenance. A sensor that needed recalibrating. He had stood in my kitchen and talked about output levels while a camera watched my daughter's window, and he had done it with the easy manner of a man performing a job he believed was ordinary. That was the part I could not forgive, even then, even before I knew the full scale of it. Not that he had installed a hidden device, though that was bad enough, but that he had looked me in the eye afterward and told me the system was fine, told me the panels were working, told me to call if I had any concerns, all while knowing that the concerns I might have had were the very thing he was paid to prevent me from discovering. Helen had tried to warn me, and he had stood in my doorway and told her I did not want to speak with her, and I had never given him permission to say that, and yet the lie had worked because it wore a uniform and arrived with a work order. Travis's silence on my driveway was not the silence of a man who had nothing to say. It was the silence of a man who had said too much already, in all the wrong rooms, to all the wrong people, and who had finally run out of explanations that sounded reasonable.
Naomi looked at the screen, at her father's face frozen in the feed, and said something that made Helen turn toward her sharply.
"My father sent the link."
"We don't know that," Helen said.
"He created the system."
"That does not mean he sent it."
"He is inside Marcus's house."
Helen did not argue further, and I understood why. The facts were piling up faster than either of them could sort them, and the question of who sent the link mattered less, in that moment, than the fact that two men were standing in my daughter's bedroom doorway arguing about a wall that should never have existed.
Then Aaron looked toward the hidden camera again, and moved one hand behind his back, and Helen leaned closer to the tablet with a sudden, sharp intake of breath.
"What is he doing?" I asked.
Naomi wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "That's our signal."
"What signal?"
"When I was little, he used it when he couldn't talk." Her voice steadied as she explained, the way a child explains a game she has never forgotten. "Three fingers mean wait. Two mean run. One means listen."
On the screen, Aaron opened three fingers. Then two. Then he pointed downward, deliberately, holding the gesture long enough for us to see it clearly.
Helen understood first. "He wants us to go to his house."
"His house?" I asked, confused, because Aaron Burke did not have a house. Aaron Burke was dead, or supposed to be dead, and dead men do not have houses.
Helen looked toward her blue property across the fence, toward the small house where she had lived alone for years, where she had grown tomatoes and collected packages for Ava and brought me dinner every Sunday for nearly six months after Danielle died. I had been inside that house many times, had sat at her kitchen table and eaten her cooking and listened to her stories about the telephone company, and I had never once thought about what might lie beneath it. Now I understood that the basement was not just storage and old equipment. It was the other end of something, a place Aaron had built long before any of this began, and Helen was telling us, with the calm of a woman who had finally found a door she could open, that the answers we needed were not in my house at all, but under hers.
"My house," she said. "The basement."