The knock came at 7:40 on a Thursday evening in October, two firm raps and then a third, the way people knock when they have a badge and want you to know it.
I was at the kitchen table with a mug of rooibos gone cold and a spreadsheet open on my laptop, the one with seventeen hundred rows, each row a photograph, each photograph a tree. I had been expecting something. I had not been expecting this.
Two officers from the Larkin Police Department stood on my front step under the porch light. One was a woman in her thirties with her hair pulled back so tight it looked like it hurt, and a name bar that said REYES. The other was older, heavyset, with a gray mustache and the patient, slightly bored face of a man who has knocked on a great many doors over a great many disputes about leaf blowers. His said MULCAHY.
Behind them, out on the sidewalk, stood Karen Whitcombe.
She wore a quilted vest the color of a new penny and she held her phone up at chest height, screen outward, the way some people hold a crucifix in a vampire movie. The streetlight caught her ash-blond bob. Her husband, Gary, was not with her. Gary was rarely with her. A few porch lights had come on up and down Larkspur Lane, and I could see the Feeneys' blinds tilt open across the street.
"Eleanor Haskett?" Officer Reyes said.
"Nell," I said. "Yes."
"Ma'am, we've received a complaint from your neighbor that you've been photographing her and her home without her consent. Including, she says, through her windows." She said it evenly, without inflection. "We'd like to talk to you about that."
I looked past her at Karen. Karen lifted her chin.
I had taught high school biology for thirty-one years. I had broken up fights between linebackers, talked a girl down from a ledge of a different kind, and once, memorably, removed a live garter snake from the drop ceiling of Room 114 while twenty-six sophomores filmed it. I knew what fear felt like in my own body, and I felt it then, a cold coin pressed against my sternum. But underneath it was something steadier, something that had been settling into place for three months like sediment.
"Of course," I said. "Please come in. Would you mind if I get my binders first?"