The repair work itself took weeks, and Colin learned the rhythm of it the way homeowners learn the rhythm of any long repair: crews arriving early, equipment humming through the morning, the smell of drying agents in the crawl space, the sound of shovels in the flower beds. The drying crew set up fans beneath the dining-room extension and ran them for days, checking moisture readings each morning with a handheld meter and writing the numbers on a clipboard Colin never asked to see but always glanced at anyway. The numbers fell slowly, then faster, then held steady, and when the crew leader finally said the space was dry, Colin crouched at the access hatch and looked inside himself before he believed it. The foundation insulation came out in damp sections and went back in clean and dry, and the new sprinkler line went into a trench that Colin watched being dug with unusual attention, because he now knew things about what could lie beneath a yard. The contractor, a patient man who explained each step before doing it, showed Colin the pipe, the fittings, and the pressure readings, and Colin asked more questions than he had ever asked a contractor in his life. He did not apologize for the questions. The contractor did not seem to mind them.
The demolition of Dana's widened driveway took longer than Colin expected, and he watched parts of it from his own side yard without making a spectacle of himself. The crew cut the dark stamped concrete into sections and lifted them away, revealing the soil and the chamber beneath, and for the first time the neighborhood could see the shape of what had been hidden: the square of the valve station, the line of the old fire main, the scar where the illegal branch had run toward the garage. Samuel visited the site twice while the work went on, standing at the edge of the excavation with his hands in his pockets, saying little, and Colin understood that Samuel was watching the end of a problem he had helped build the system to prevent forty years earlier. The new secured access hatch went in beside the former driveway, set into a concrete collar with a locking cover and a small marker plate, and a city technician tested the lock three times while Colin watched from the fence. It was a modest piece of hardware, unremarkable to look at, and Colin found that reassuring. The old hatch had been hidden beneath decorative concrete. The new one was visible, labeled, and locked, and visibility was the entire point.
Colin also spent time, during those eleven months, thinking about the two messages the prosecutors had read aloud, because they explained Dana better than any speech she gave in her own defense. "Keep night draw under the school alarm threshold" was not the language of someone who believed a connection was temporary and harmless. It was the language of someone managing a system, watching a limit, and adjusting behavior to stay beneath it. A threshold meant someone had measured, and measuring meant someone knew exactly what was being taken and how much attention it could attract. The second message was blunter still: "If city isolates 3B Monday, the branch will appear immediately. Reeves must be blamed before then." Colin read that sentence several times when the court record became available, because it contained the whole plan in nineteen words: a deadline, a discovery that could not be prevented, and a man who had to be blamed before the discovery arrived. The sprinkler, the flood, the complaint, the red folder, the shutoff demand, all of it had been built backward from that Monday morning test, like scaffolding erected around a date. Dana had not improvised on Saturday morning. She had executed a schedule. The hammer had been the loudest tool in the schedule, but the schedule itself was the crime, and the schedule was written down, which was why it could be proved.