It started with banana bread.
A week after the crash on Alder Street — after Daniel had given his statement, after the truck had been found, after the doorbell footage had surfaced — Helen Marsh knocked on Daniel's front door holding a loaf of banana bread wrapped in foil. She smiled the careful smile of a woman performing neighborliness.
"I just wanted to thank you," she said, "for helping that poor cyclist. You did a kind thing, running out in the rain."
Daniel accepted the bread. It seemed churlish not to. Helen stood on his porch for a few minutes, asking about the garden, about Emily's school, about nothing in particular — and then, as if it had just occurred to her, she said: "Chris feels just terrible about all this. The police asking questions, the truck impounded. He's a good boy, Daniel. He'd never hurt anyone on purpose."
It was so lightly done that Daniel almost missed the shape of it. Almost.
The second visit came four days later. This time she brought no bread. She stood at his front door with her hands clasped and her eyes wet, and she talked about Chris as a little boy — the ear infections, the way he'd cried at his father's funeral, how hard he'd worked to buy that truck himself.
"I know you saw something that night," she said. "I'm not asking you to lie. I would never ask that. I'm just asking you to think about whether you're sure. It was raining. It was dark. It was three seconds. A mother is asking you to be sure."
Daniel told her, gently, that he was sure about what he'd seen. She nodded, wiped her eyes, and left. Megan found him standing in the hallway afterward, staring at the closed door.
"She's working on you," Megan said.
"I know," Daniel said again. It was becoming a refrain.
The third visit was different. Helen didn't knock on the front door. She appeared at the side fence at four o'clock, while Daniel was in his green chair with his coffee, and leaned on the fence rail like a woman out for a stroll.
"Lovely tomatoes," she said.
They talked about the garden for a while. Then Helen said, "The lawyer says these things can drag on for years. Hearings, trials, appeals. It wears on everyone. Chris can't sleep. I can't sleep." She paused. "Sometimes I wonder if there's a way for everyone to just... move forward. For all of us."
Daniel understood the offer inside the words. He didn't answer it.
After that, the visits became a pattern — twice a week, sometimes three times, always at the fence at four o'clock, always framed as neighborly chat. Helen asked about his work-from-home schedule. She asked what time he usually finished in the garden. She commented on his routine with the fondness of someone memorizing it.
"You always sit right there, don't you?" she said one afternoon, nodding at the green chair. "Same spot every day. It's nice, having a routine."
Daniel felt the back of his neck prickle, but he smiled and said something about creatures of habit.
The emotional appeals escalated. One evening she knocked after dinner, and when Daniel opened the door, she was crying openly — not the controlled tears of the second visit, but real, shaking sobs.
"They're going to take him from me," she said. "Prison, Daniel. My boy. For an accident. He panicked — he was scared, he didn't know what to do, he's not a bad person. Please. I'm begging you as a mother. If there's anything — anything — that would help you see this differently—"
Megan came to the door then, and Helen composed herself with visible effort, apologized for the hour, and left. Daniel closed the door and leaned against it.
"She's not going to stop," Megan said.
"No," Daniel said. "She's not."
He was right. But neither of them imagined, then, what "not stopping" would come to mean.
What Daniel didn't know — what he wouldn't learn until the search warrant, until Detective Lang laid it all out on his kitchen table weeks later — was that the fence visits had a second purpose beyond pressure. Helen wasn't just trying to change his mind. She was studying him.
Every afternoon at the fence, she'd noted the details: what time he came out, how long he stayed, where he sat — the green chair, always the green chair. She'd asked about his work-from-home schedule under the guise of small talk and filed away the answer: he was home. He was always home.
And from her upstairs window, she'd watched it all happen in real time, day after day, the way a person watches a train schedule. The chair. The coffee. The gloves. The four o'clock shadow stretching across the beds.
By the time she walked through his side gate at 7:18 that morning with a pry bar wrapped in gray cloth, Helen Marsh knew Daniel Cross's afternoon better than Daniel Cross did. She knew exactly where he would be sitting.