The white truck turned into my driveway at quarter to nine the next morning, and I had not called anyone.
Mia and I were on the porch with coffee, watching Delgado's cruiser sit at the curb β she had left an officer there overnight, a quiet young man who waved at us when we came out. The truck said SUNHARVEST ENERGY on the side in green letters. It pulled in fast and stopped hard, and the driver was out before the engine finished settling.
Travis Cole. Sunburned neck. The same man who had repaired my panels three times and looked me in the eye and implied I was wrecking my own equipment.
He stared up at the red roof. Then he saw the officer, and then he saw me, and his face did a quick calculation I could read from twenty feet away.
"What did she do?" he called.
I stood up. "How did you know the system was damaged, Travis?"
"Our monitoring center detected a loss of output." He was already walking toward the truck bed. "Standard alert. We dispatch automatically."
"The inverter is still connected," I said.
He hesitated for half a step. "We received an automatic alert."
"From what? The panels are covered in paint. The inverter never went offline. What exactly sent you an alert?"
He didn't answer. He dropped the tailgate, and inside the truck bed, strapped down with orange webbing, was a replacement solar panel.
Panel number six. I knew because there was a printed label on the frame with my address on it. My street. My house number. My name, spelled right.
The damage had happened less than fifteen minutes before he arrived. SunHarvest's nearest warehouse was forty miles away, on the other side of the county line, past the reservoir. There was no possible way he could have loaded the correct replacement panel, driven forty miles, and reached my house in fifteen minutes.
He had been waiting nearby.
The officer got out of the cruiser and walked over. Behind us, the front door of Grace's yellow house opened, and Grace came out β no handcuffs now, in a clean sweater, her hair combed. Sophie hovered in the doorway behind her.
Grace looked at the panel in the truck bed and laughed. It was not a happy sound.
"You received an alert," she said, "because your transmitter stopped sending."
Travis's head snapped toward her. "Mrs. Thornton."
"Travis Cole." She walked to the edge of her yard, stopping at the fence. "How long were you parked on Alder Street? An hour? Two?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"The warehouse is forty miles away." She pointed at the labeled panel. "That label was printed before the paint was dry. You knew which panel to bring. You knew before anyone called."
"I told you," Travis said, louder, to the officer, to me, to no one, "the monitoring center flagged an output loss. That's all this is."
"The inverter is connected," I said again. "Say it plainly, Travis. What sent the alert?"
He looked at me, and for a second the customer-service mask slipped and I saw something underneath it that I did not like β not guilt, exactly. Arithmetic. He was deciding what this would cost him.
Then the sound of another car came from the street. A gray county sedan pulled up behind Delgado's cruiser, and a woman got out β mid-forties, plain blazer, a badge on a lanyard, a laptop bag over her shoulder. She walked straight to the truck, looked at the pre-labeled panel, looked at Travis, and then looked up at my red roof.
"Mr. Cole," she said. "I'm Investigator Dana Cole, county cybercrimes. I have a search authorization connected to an existing investigation into SunHarvest Energy installations." She held up a folded document. "I'd like to see inside your equipment case before you touch anything on this roof."
Travis went very still.
"This is private equipment," he said. "Owned by SunHarvest."
"You arrived with a replacement panel for damage that occurred fifteen minutes ago, from a warehouse forty miles away," Dana Cole said. "And your label was printed before the paint was dry. I'd like to understand how."
The officer at the curb straightened. Travis looked from the investigator to the officer to the red roof and back to the truck bed, and the arithmetic on his face was getting more complicated by the second.
Grace, at the fence, folded her arms. She looked at me across the two yards, and her expression said what she had been saying all along, in tar and cut cables and red paint, in notes that never arrived and emails that went to spam.
Now, finally, somebody was listening.