The third time was stranger than the first two. Someone had sprayed a cloudy substance across the glass of several panels, a milky film that dulled the surface and cut the system's output by almost half. I stood in the yard and watched the numbers on the inverter display and felt a helpless kind of anger, the anger of a man watching something he owns slowly stop working for reasons he cannot see. My insurance company warned me that another claim could cancel my coverage. I remember the tone of that phone call, polite and final. The installer accused me again, more directly this time, of damaging the equipment myself. I argued with him. I told him I had no reason to destroy my own panels. He told me the damage did not match any weather pattern he knew. We went back and forth until there was nothing left to say, and he left, and I stood in my yard feeling accused in my own home.
Every camera facing the roof seemed to fail during the exact minutes the vandalism occurred. That was the detail that bothered me most, even more than the money. I had cameras. I had a security system. I was a careful homeowner, or at least I thought I was. But each time I went back to check the footage, there was a gap, a blank stretch of time that covered exactly the minutes when the damage must have happened. I told myself it was a coincidence. I told myself the cameras were old, or the Wi-Fi was weak, or the system had glitched. I did not want to believe someone was getting past my cameras on purpose, because that idea was worse than the damage itself. It meant someone knew my house better than I did.
I suspected teenagers first. That seemed like the simplest explanation. Teenagers get bored. Teenagers climb roofs. Teenagers do stupid things for reasons that make sense only to teenagers. I found nothing.
Then I suspected the contractor. That seemed like the next simplest explanation. Maybe the installer had done a bad job and was covering it up. Maybe someone on his crew was cutting corners and then cutting cables to hide the evidence. I called the company and demanded answers. I got polite deflections and a repair bill. I never got a straight answer, and I never found any proof, and after a while I stopped suspecting anyone in particular and started suspecting bad luck itself, as if my house had simply become the kind of place where things went wrong.
I never suspected Helen. I want to be clear about that, because it matters. Helen was seventy-two years old. She lived alone in the small blue house directly behind mine, and the fence between our yards had always felt more like a boundary between friends than a wall between strangers. She grew tomatoes beside that fence, and in the summer I could smell them when I stood in my own yard. She collected packages for Ava when I worked late, leaving them inside her front door until I could pick them up. After Danielle died, Helen brought dinner to our house every Sunday for nearly six months. She would knock, hand me a covered dish, and ask how Ava was doing, and she never stayed long enough to make it awkward. She simply showed up, week after week, until the worst of the grief had passed enough for us to manage on our own.
Danielle had been alive when the solar system was installed. That is a detail I think about now more than I did then. She was there when the installers came, when the panels went up, when the inverter was connected. She spent her final year undergoing treatment for cancer, and during that year the house filled with technicians and appointments and quiet conversations in hallways. I did not pay close attention to every person who came through the door. I was paying attention to Danielle. I was paying attention to Ava. The solar system was supposed to be one less thing to worry about, a quiet machine on the roof doing its job while we dealt with everything else. I trusted it the way I trusted the refrigerator and the furnace, without thinking about it, and that trust, I would later learn, was exactly what someone else had been counting on.