He had taken a picture.

I slammed the curtain shut, pulled Emma behind me, and called 911.

My hands were shaking so hard I had to restart the call because I hit the wrong contact first.

The dispatcher kept her voice level and practical, which helped me stay coherent long enough to describe the man, the camera, the street, and the house number.

By the time I looked again, he was gone.

A patrol car arrived about twenty minutes later.

The officer who came to the door introduced himself as Officer Campos.

He walked the block, shined a flashlight into the ditch across the street, checked the alley at the end of the road, and found nothing.

Before he left, he asked whether there was anyone who might have reason to watch me.

A former partner.

A custody issue.

An ongoing dispute.

I said there had just been a divorce, but that my ex lived across town and had never done anything like this.

Campos gave me the careful kind of look police officers give when they know you are not saying everything because you do not yet know what matters.

Emma did not go back to sleep.

She sat on my bed with a blanket wrapped around her and whispered that it was the same man she had seen by the fence.

I told

her we were safe now, because the police had come and the doors were locked, but even while I said it I was aware of how flimsy that sentence sounded.

Safety is not a lock.

Safety is the absence of being studied.

At dawn I opened the front door to get the newspaper and nearly stepped on a large brown envelope.

Inside were six printed photographs.

They had all been taken recently, and close enough to make my skin crawl.

One showed me carrying a lamp from the moving truck on our first day.

Another showed Emma standing alone on the porch, holding her stuffed rabbit against her stomach while she watched me fumble with the keys.

Another was taken from the backyard looking toward the kitchen window, so close that my hand was visible on the countertop inside.

On the back of the last photo, in thick block letters, someone had written: STABILITY MATTERS.

I called Officer Campos back before I finished my first cup of coffee.

He returned within the hour, bagged the envelope and photos, and asked again whether there was any custody conflict.

This time I told him more.

Daniel had wanted primary custody at first.

He had backed down during mediation when his lawyer told him the court was unlikely to grant it, but he had never hidden his belief that Emma would be better off with him.

Better organized.

Better supervised.

Better protected from my emotional decisions, as he liked to phrase it.

Campos asked whether Daniel knew our new address.

I said yes.

He had sent me the listing.

That detail changed the room.

I called Daniel after Campos left.

He answered on the third ring sounding almost cheerful, and that alone made me angrier than I can properly explain.

When I told him a man had been outside the house taking pictures, there was a small pause.

Then he asked whether I was sure it wasn’t just a neighbor’s security camera.

I said a security camera does not stand under a dead streetlamp at two in the morning and flash through a bedroom window.

He gave a dry little laugh and told me I was letting my imagination run away with me.

Then he asked, too casually, whether Emma had seen the man too.

I hung up right after that.

The next person who gave me a piece of truth was my neighbor, Judy Harlan, a retired school secretary who lived two houses down.

She came by that afternoon with a loaf of banana bread and the kind of concern Midwestern women know how to disguise as politeness.

She had seen the patrol car and wanted to make sure we were all right.

When I told her someone had been around the house, her face changed in a subtle but unmistakable way.

She said the woman who rented the place before us had moved out quickly.

Judy had seen a strange man near the backyard more than once that spring.

When she mentioned it to the property manager, a man named Seth Walker, he told her it was probably a surveyor checking easements.

Judy did not say she disbelieved him, but she did not have to.

That night Emma told me there was a clicking sound in the hallway.

I almost dismissed

it.

Then, while we were brushing our teeth, I heard it too.

A tiny mechanical tap that came and went.

We both turned our heads toward the ceiling.

The smoke detector above the hall shelves looked newer than the others.