Colin turned toward Dana's house. "She wanted us gone before the city found the real connection," he said.
Samuel joined them, his hard hat in one hand, his tablet in the other. "Probably before the next pressure inspection," he said.
"When was that?" Colin asked.
"Monday morning," Samuel said.
Dana had less than forty-eight hours. Colin did the arithmetic in his head, Saturday morning to Monday morning, two days, and felt the tightness of that window like a hand closing. The city had scheduled a full fire-loop test after months of unexplained losses. Once engineers closed each valve station individually, isolating one section at a time, the unauthorized branch under her driveway would become obvious. There would be no explaining it away, no blaming a neighbor's sprinkler, no paperwork that could cover a pipe that appeared on a scan and led to construction tanks in the woods. She needed another explanation in the records first, something official, something with an inspector's name on it, something that would make the branch look like someone else's problem before the test made it look like hers. Colin's broken sprinkler was meant to provide one.
Colin thought about the advisory and what it meant in practical terms, because practical terms were the only terms that mattered when a child lived in the house. It meant bottled water for drinking and cooking until the tests came back. It meant Alex asking why the tap was suddenly untrustworthy, and Colin answering honestly that he did not know yet, that the crews were checking, that the school and the medical center were being checked too. It meant neighbors standing on their porches comparing notices, reading the same careful language about pressure reversals and sampling, and trying not to frighten each other while being frightened. The medical center on Halston Road mattered to Colin in a way he had not expected. He pictured patients there, people already unwell, drinking water that might carry fuel residue or concrete additives or bacteria, and the picture made his jaw tighten. A fire loop was supposed to protect people. That was its entire purpose. It existed so that hydrants would have pressure when a building burned, so that a school full of children would not be left waiting for water that never arrived. To use it as a private supply was not only theft. It was a decision to gamble with the safety of strangers, and the strangers included a school full of children and a medical center full of patients, and that, more than the money, more than the gallons, was what stayed with Colin as the testing crews moved down the street.
He thought about his own house in the same practical terms. The flood had soaked the foundation insulation near the side wall. Water had entered the crawl space beneath the dining room extension. Three flower beds were destroyed, and mud coated the driveway, and the basement had needed every old towel in the laundry room. Those were repairs, and repairs could be made, but the advisory added a different kind of damage, the kind that lives in a person's head after the water is cleaned up: the knowledge that the system under your street, the system you trusted without thinking, had been opened and used and left without its safeguards. Trust, Colin was learning, was a kind of infrastructure too, and it was harder to repair than insulation.
Dana in the back seat of the patrol car watched the workers cut into her driveway, and Colin watched her watching. Her hands were in her lap. Her beige pants, clean that morning, were dusted now with concrete powder. She did not look at him. She looked at the driveway, at the chamber opening to the sky, at the pipe that had been her secret and was now a trench full of daylight, and Colin thought about the two years she had lived beside him, the cookies when Alex returned from summer camp, the painter recommendations, the invitations to neighborhood meetings, all of it friendly, all of it ordinary, all of it happening at the same time as the pipe. He did not try to reconcile the two versions of her. He let them sit side by side, the neighbor and the scheme, because both had been real, and that was what made the betrayal difficult to name.