Delgado left the folder with us and went back to the station. Mia took the signal logs up to her room to study them, the way she studies everything when she is upset β by organizing it. I stayed at the kitchen table with the kitchen display showing my dead array: twelve panels, zero output, red paint over everything.
My phone rang. It was Grace's house number. I answered before the second ring.
"Daniel?" It was a girl's voice, thin and rushed. "It's Sophie. Is my grandma β is she in jail?"
"She's at the station. She's okay. She's β Sophie, are you alright?"
"She told me she was going to do it. The paint. She told me this morning before she went over." Sophie's voice cracked. "She said if she didn't come back by noon I should call you. She said you'd explain."
"Explain what?"
"About the camera. About the β the link. Can I come over? I have my tablet. I need to show you."
"Yes. Come around the back. Mia's home."
She arrived five minutes later with a gray tablet clutched to her chest like a book. She was sixteen and pale, with the look of a kid who had not been sleeping. Mia led her to the couch and sat close, the way she used to sit with Sophie when they were little and Sophie visited in the summers.
"Two weeks ago," Sophie said, "I got a text from a number I didn't know. It was just a link. No message." She woke the tablet and opened a photo album. "I clicked it."
The first screenshot showed a video player. The image was grainy and blue-tinted, shot from above and at an angle. It showed a bedroom β Sophie's bedroom, in Grace's yellow house β seen from high above the window. A girl, small in the frame, sat on the edge of a bed in pajamas, rubbing her eyes.
"That's you," Mia whispered.
"That's me waking up. Two weeks ago, Tuesday." Sophie swiped. The next screenshot showed the same room, empty, the bed made. "That's me leaving for school." She swiped again. A third shot: an older woman moving through the frame with a laundry basket. "That's Grandma. Alone in the house."
Beside the video, in the screenshots, there was a panel of text. Sophie zoomed in with two fingers.
It was a schedule. Wake-up times. School departure times. Notes like "G alone 9β3" and "S home 3:40." And at the bottom, in plain text, the four-digit code to Grace's alarm system.
"Whoever it was knew everything," Sophie said. "When I woke up. When I left. When Grandma was alone. They knew the alarm code, Daniel. My grandma's alarm code."
"What did the police say?" I asked.
"They said it was probably someone from social media. A stalker. They told me to make my accounts private." Her voice went flat. "I don't even post. I have forty followers and they're all people I know from school."
She swiped to the last screenshot. The video player showed a black screen with white text: THIS LINK HAS EXPIRED.
"It vanished," she said. "The day after I took the screenshots. Gone like it was never there."
Mia put her arm around Sophie's shoulders. "Did you show this to Mrs. Thornton?"
"She's the one who figured it out." Sophie looked at me. "Grandma looked at the screenshots for a long time. Then she went upstairs with binoculars and stared at your roof for an hour. She came down and said, 'Panel six. It's panel six. The angle matches.'"
I felt the kitchen get very quiet around me.
"She said every time she damaged your panels, the signal stopped," Sophie went on. "She could feel it β she has this old scanner thing, and the bursts would just quit. And then SunHarvest would come fix everything, and by that afternoon the bursts were back. She said it was like β like the roof was breathing, and she kept having to hold its mouth shut."
"Why didn't she tell you what she was doing?" Mia asked gently.
"She didn't want me scared. She said she could handle it herself." Sophie's eyes filled. "She's seventy-one. She climbed your roof four times with tar and tools and paint, and she didn't tell me because she didn't want me scared, and now she's in handcuffs because of me."
"Because of whoever put a camera under my panel," I said.
Sophie nodded. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, angry at the tears.
"There's something else," she said. "Grandma said it wasn't only about me. She said β she said your roof was doing something bigger. She said she found the same kind of signal in other places. All over Cedar Falls."
"How many?"
"She said fourteen."