“I think,” Helen said, pulling a chair close and sitting down, “that we’re about to find out.”

The Garzas had lived at 26 Meadow Lane for 31 years. They had raised two daughters in that house. Walt had built the back deck himself over the course of three summers. Helen had planted the hydrangeas along the front walkway, nursed them through droughts and ice storms, and watched them bloom every June like clockwork.

That house wasn’t just where they lived. It was the physical record of their marriage, their parenthood, their whole adult lives.

The neighborhood had been good once. Working families, mostly people who mowed on Saturdays and waved when you drove past. The kind of street where someone would notice if your newspaper sat too long on the porch and they’d check on you. Not out of nosiness, but because that’s what neighbors did.

But things had changed.

It started small.

Little things that Helen noticed because Helen noticed everything. She’d been a bookkeeper for 34 years at a plumbing supply company. Numbers, patterns, things that didn’t add up. That was her whole professional life. And she carried it into retirement the way some people carry reading glasses.

Always looking, always counting, always filing things away in a mind that refused to slow down just because her body had.

The first thing she noticed was the cars.

About a year ago, unfamiliar vehicles began appearing on Meadow Lane at night. Not visitors, not rideshare drivers. Cars that would park at odd angles near the Duca house or the empty lot at the end of the cul-de-sac, sit with their engines running for 10, 15 minutes, then leave, always between 1 and 4 in the morning.

Always different cars.

Helen mentioned it to Walt, who shrugged and said it was probably kids. She mentioned it to Frank Duca, who said he hadn’t noticed anything. She mentioned it to Mrs. Callaway, who changed the subject with suspicious speed.

The second thing she noticed was the lights.

The Anderson house, which had belonged to a quiet couple named Pete and Donna Anderson for as long as the Garzas had lived there, went dark in a way that didn’t make sense. Pete and Donna had moved to Arizona 4 months earlier, and their son Keith had taken over the property. He said he was renting it out, but the pattern of lights was wrong.

Rooms that should have been bedrooms stayed dark all night. Rooms that should have been storage lit up at 2 in the morning, and the glow wasn’t the warm yellow of living. It was the blue-white flicker of something else entirely.

Third, and this was the one that really got under Helen’s skin, things started happening to their property.

Small things at first. The garden hose was moved from where she’d coiled it. The gate latch, which Walt had fixed in September, was found hanging loose again in October, as if someone had forced it. Scratches appeared on the back door lock. One morning, Helen found a cigarette butt on the back deck.

Neither she nor Walt smoked. Neither did anyone they knew.

She told Walt she wanted to install cameras. He resisted at first the way Walt resisted anything that required him to learn new technology, which is to say completely and without logic.