I'd gone to her house to talk about it. She'd answered the door in a lavender cardigan with her reading glasses pushed up into her silver-blond bob, and she'd been perfectly pleasant. She'd offered me iced tea. She'd explained that the rule existed because a few years back two neighbors had gotten into a feud and pointed cameras into each other's bedrooms, and the board had decided, for everyone's privacy, to require approval. She'd said she was sure the committee would look favorably on my application in October. She'd said she understood about my hours. She'd said, "We all look after each other here, Gisele. That's what Larkhaven is."
I'd taken it down. I'd filed the application. I'd never heard back.
What I hadn't mentioned to her, because it never occurred to me that it was relevant, was the dashcam.
I'd bought it two years earlier, after someone backed into my old Corolla in the St. Brigid's employee garage at four in the morning and drove off, leaving me with a crumpled quarter panel and a twelve-hundred-dollar deductible. The car I drove now was a gray Subaru Outback with a hundred and six thousand miles on it, and the dashcam was a two-lens unit the size of a deck of cards, tucked up behind the rearview mirror. One lens faced the road. The other faced the cabin, with infrared, because the reviews said that was what rideshare drivers used and I figured if it was good enough for people who let strangers into their back seats at two in the morning, it was good enough for a hospital garage. The guy at the electronics store had hardwired it into the fuse box so that when the car was off it dropped into a parking mode, sleeping until something moved or bumped the car, then recording a short clip and going back to sleep. It saved everything to a memory card. There was an app. I had used the app exactly twice, both times in the first week, and then turned off its notifications because it pinged me every time a leaf blew across the windshield.
I'm telling you this now because I want you to understand that I didn't think of it. Not that night. Not the next day. In my mind, the backpack had been on Izzy's back, or at his feet, or in his locker, or on the floor of his bedroom, the whole time. It had never been anywhere I could see. And the dashcam was just a thing on my windshield, like the parking sticker and the little air freshener shaped like a pine tree, part of the furniture of my life that I'd long since stopped noticing.
Bobbie Tillotson came to the door on Friday afternoon with a lasagna.
I was supposed to be asleep. I'd called out of my shift, which I'd done maybe four times in nineteen years, and I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the juvenile court summons for the third time when the bell rang. Izzy was in his room with the door shut. He'd been in there since morning. I'd heard him, once, through the door, practicing a word over and over in a whisper, and I couldn't make out what it was.
She was wearing a camel coat and holding a glass baking dish covered in foil with both hands, with a pair of quilted oven mitts on, the way you'd carry something to a church supper.
"Gisele," she said. "Oh, honey. I heard. I'm so, so sorry."
I didn't ask her how she'd heard. In a subdivision of a hundred and twelve houses, a sheriff's cruiser and a woman following it home at nine at night is a news bulletin.
"It's very kind of you," I said, and took the lasagna, because what else do you do.
"May I come in for just a second? I won't stay."
She came in. She stood in my kitchen in her coat and looked around it the way people look around a house they're thinking of buying, at the hooks by the door, at the stack of mail, at the STEM Scholars letter on the refrigerator under the lighthouse magnet. Her eyes stopped on it, I think. I remember thinking they stopped on it.