Chapter 5
Diego's words stayed with me for weeks.
Put a camera on this unit. If somebody's touching your equipment, they're going to touch it again.
I already had a porch camera. Everybody on the street had a porch camera. Mine covered the front door and the driveway and nothing else. The AC unit sat on the side of the house, invisible from the street, invisible from the porch, invisible from everywhere except the narrow strip of yard between my house and Gloria's fence.
And I worked nights. That was the part that gnawed at me. I slept through the daylight hours behind blackout curtains while the whole neighborhood went about its business. Whoever was touching my unit had the entire day to work with, and I was unconscious through all of it.
I bought a small wireless camera from an electronics store on my day off. Nothing fancy — just a little black box with a wide lens and a battery the clerk promised would last a week. He showed me how to aim it through an app on my phone, how to scroll back through the saved footage.
The question was where to put it. Gloria watched my house the way she watched her roses — constantly, and with opinions. Anything obvious, anything mounted on a wall or a post, she'd spot it in a day and probably file a complaint about that too.
The upstairs spare bedroom faced the side yard. Its window looked straight down at the AC unit, past the fence line, with a clear view of the side gate. The room was empty except for boxes of my mother's things I still hadn't sorted through — three years later, I still couldn't bring myself to open them all. Nobody would ever see a small black camera sitting in a dark window behind a half-closed blind.
I mounted it on a stack of books on the windowsill and angled it down at the unit. The app showed a grainy but perfectly clear picture: the condenser, the fence, the gate, the whole side yard.
I tested it for a week. It caught the mailman cutting across the grass. It caught a stray cat sleeping on the warm concrete pad beside the unit. It caught Gloria walking past the fence twice, slowing down to look at the unit both times, her head tilted like she was inspecting it.
I told no one about the camera. Not Jessica. Not Diego. Not anyone. My mother used to say that when something feels wrong, you don't announce your suspicions — you watch.
The camera ran for eleven quiet days. The unit hummed. The yard stayed empty. I almost started to feel foolish.
On the twelfth day, the AC died again.
I was home that morning, awake because the rising heat had woken me. The house was already climbing past eighty when I picked up my phone and opened the camera app with a feeling like a stone dropping in my stomach.
I didn't expect to find anything. The unit was just old. Machines fail. That's what I'd been telling myself for months, even after Diego, even after the letters.
I scrolled back through the footage to the early morning hours.
And there she was.
But first, I should tell you about the eleven days before it — because those eleven days taught me how to watch.
The first few nights, I checked the footage every morning like a man checking a trap. Nothing. The unit hummed. The yard stayed empty. The stray cat came back twice and slept on the concrete pad, and I found myself oddly grateful for the company.
By day five, I'd learned the rhythm of the street from that upstairs window. The Hendersons' dog walker at 6:40. The school bus at 7:15. Gloria, every morning, pausing at the end of her driveway to look over at my unit. Just a glance. But every day.
On day eight, I went up to adjust the camera angle and ended up sitting on the floor among my mother's boxes for an hour. I opened one and found her nursing scrubs, folded with hospital corners, and a birthday card I'd made her in third grade. I sat there holding that card and crying quietly, because grief doesn't care about your schedule. I repacked the box and never told anyone.
On day ten, Gloria knocked on my door. I answered in a t-shirt, blinking in the daylight.
"Scott," she said sweetly, "the committee is still concerned about your unit. The noise last night was quite bad."
"The unit's been running fine," I said.
"Well." She smiled. "These old systems can fail without warning."
She walked away, and I stood in the doorway turning her words over. It sounded less like a warning and more like a promise.
The next morning the AC died, and I picked up my phone with a stone in my stomach.
I didn't expect to find anything. The unit was just old. Machines fail. That's what I'd told myself for months, even after Diego, even after the letters.
I scrolled back through the footage to the early morning hours.
And there she was.