Her reply came within ninety seconds. On it. Stay put.
I put the phone down and looked at my house through the windshield. No movement behind the windows, no silhouette visible in the rooms I had decorated and maintained and paid half the mortgage on for nearly a decade. Across the street, my neighbor’s security camera blinked its small red light in the gathering dark. I had spoken to my neighbor about that camera three months earlier, had mentioned casually that I sometimes worried about break-ins, had asked whether she kept the footage. She did. She kept two weeks of rolling footage and she had, at my request and without understanding the full picture of why I was asking, given me access to a shared folder where the relevant portion would be automatically saved.
My phone rang. Dana.
“Are you safe?” she asked first. She always asked that first.
“Yes,” I said.
