"Good," she said. "I mean, not good. I mean that's the best thing that could've happened. Tell him not to say anything to anyone, not a deputy, not a social worker, not a nice lady with cookies. I'll be there in forty minutes."
She was there in thirty-five. She was sixty-ish, short, broad, with a gray pixie cut. She shook my gray, grouted hand without commenting on it and went into the back.
At 9:14 that night they released him to me with a court date, a no-contact order with Halverton East property, and a manila envelope containing his belt, his shoelaces, and his lanyard. They kept the backpack. Evidence.
He didn't speak in the car. Halfway home, at the light on Route 9 by the Dairy Mart, he said, without stuttering, the way it sometimes happens when he says something he's rehearsed a hundred times in his head, "You asked me if they were mine."
"I know."
"You asked."
"I know, honey. I'm sorry. I don't think they're yours. I never thought they were yours. I asked because I'm—" I didn't know how to finish. Because I'm scared. Because I've seen too much. Because I'm a coward for one second at a time. "I'm sorry."
He looked out the window. The light changed. Behind us someone honked, and I drove.
When we pulled into Larkhaven Commons, every porch light on Finch Hollow Lane seemed to be on. I noticed this, distantly, the way you notice weather. Our house was the last one before the cul-de-sac, a beige ranch with green shutters that the previous owners had put in a red front door on, which the HOA had made me repaint, in July, to Approved Palette Shade 14, Hunter. Across the street, Mr. Oyelaran's garage was open and the old man was sitting in a lawn chair in it, as he did most evenings, with a radio on low. He raised one hand when we passed. I raised mine.
Two houses down from us, the big brick colonial on the corner lot, the only two-story on the street, had its porch light on too, and its upstairs light, and a woman standing in the bay window with her arms folded, watching us pull in.
That was Roberta Tillotson. President of the Larkhaven Commons Homeowners Association for eleven consecutive years. Everybody called her Bobbie, to her face. Behind her back, in the group chat that the younger families on the walking loop kept and that I'd been added to in August by a nice woman with twin toddlers, she was called the Karen of Larkhaven, or just the Karen, or sometimes, when someone had gotten a fresh violation letter, worse.
I'd had three letters from her by October. The front door. The garbage cans, which I had left out until Thursday after a Tuesday pickup because I was working nights and sleeping days. And the doorbell camera.
That one had stung. I'd installed a camera doorbell in July, the week we moved in, because I work nights and my fifteen-year-old would be home alone three evenings a week. Bobbie had sent me a letter, hand-delivered, in a cream-colored envelope with the HOA seal embossed on it, informing me that Article VII, Section 4 of the covenants prohibited "exterior recording devices visible from the common area or adjoining lots" without prior written approval from the Architectural Review Committee, that the committee met quarterly, that the next meeting was in October, and that the device must be removed within ten days or fines of fifty dollars a day would accrue.