Peter's sentencing took the longest of anyone's, and not because the case was complicated. The evidence was enormous. The complication was him β a man who had helped commit the crimes and helped expose them, and the law doesn't have a clean label for that.
He cooperated without receiving full immunity. His lawyer argued that Sentinel had controlled him after the warehouse fire β that Victor had the sprinkler-alert evidence over him, that the company threatened Sophie and Grace, that Peter was trapped. That was true, as far as it went.
Then investigators found the bank accounts.
Over the eight years, Peter had accepted payments from Sentinel's restricted operations β not huge bonuses, but steady money, and enough of it that he could have left more than once. He had choices. Dangerous ones, yes. Ones that might have put him in prison, yes. But choices. He had chosen not to take them.
The pretrial hearing had one moment that everyone in the county read about. Mrs. Evelyn Shaw, sixty-eight, was one of the burglary victims. The crew had entered her house while she was at physical therapy and taken her mother's jewelry, her husband's military medals, and the cash she had saved for her granddaughter. Her alarm had been disabled through a SunHarvest relay β the same kind of relay on my roof.
She asked to speak to Peter directly, and the judge allowed it.
Mrs. Shaw stood at the microphone and did not rush. She described coming home from physical therapy to find the drawers open. The medals had been in a case her husband kept polished for forty years. The cash was meant for her granddaughter's college. She described calling the police, and the alarm company, and being told nothing was wrong with the system. She described lying awake for months afterward, listening to every sound in her own house.
Then she turned to Peter.
"You knew my schedule?" she asked.
"Yes."
"You knew I lived alone?"
"Yes."
"You knew they planned to enter?"
"No."
"Did you know Sentinel sold access to houses?"
"Yes."
"Then you knew enough."
Peter lowered his head. "Yes."
Mrs. Shaw looked toward Sophie, who was sitting beside Grace in the gallery. "I am sorry your father was threatened," she said to the girl. Then she turned back to Peter. "That does not make my house the place where he was entitled to hide."
He pleaded guilty to illegal surveillance, computer intrusion, evidence tampering, conspiracy, and concealing Caleb Morris's death. His cooperation reduced the sentence. It did not eliminate it.
At sentencing he spoke, and this time he did not describe himself as a secret investigator, which is what his lawyer had been leaning toward for months.
"I created the first node to help people remain safe inside their homes," he said. "That fact became the excuse I repeated after the system stopped being safe. I said the design was being misused, but I continued improving it. I said I stayed to collect evidence, but I also stayed because exposure would reveal my own decisions. I said I disappeared to protect my daughter, but I watched her grieve me because returning would have required me to confess."
He looked toward Sophie.
"I cannot ask her to understand that as love."
Sophie did not look away. Grace held her hand.
He received a prison sentence followed by supervised release. Grace visited him once during the first year. Sophie didn't. He wrote letters, and Sophie kept them unopened in a box in her desk drawer. When people asked whether she forgave him, she answered that forgiveness was not a deadline adults could impose on a child.
I thought that was the truest sentence anyone said through the whole ordeal. Everyone wanted the story to resolve β the daughter forgives the father, the family heals. Sophie refused to perform that. She kept the letters. She read the envelope addresses, maybe. She just didn't open them. Repair takes the time it takes, and nobody gets to schedule somebody else's.
Grace told me later that the letters got longer as the months went on. Peter wrote about the facility, about the work crews, about the books he'd been reading. He wrote about remembering Hannah, which Grace said was the first time in eight years he'd put her name on paper voluntarily. Sophie still didn't open them. Grace put each one in the box without reading them herself β she said the letters weren't hers to look at, even unopened.
"You think she'll ever read them?" I asked.
Grace was quiet for a while. Then she said, "She'll read them when she decides the man who wrote them is worth knowing. Not before. And not because anyone tells her to."
After the sentencing, the reporters left. The neighbors stopped calling. Our street settled back into the ordinary sounds of a suburb. The only thing that still marked us was my roof, which stayed red-painted for weeks because the investigators asked me not to clean it until the trials were over. From the street the house looked vandalized. Grace used to joke that it was the most honest-looking house in Cedar Falls. I told her honesty was expensive. She said, "Everything worth having is."