After the officer left, Alma admitted she had been counting the cost of the stolen tablet and worrying about whether insurance would cover it. Now she was worried about something less measurable. “I keep thinking we built the room where this started,” she said.

“We built a room for children to make things,” Mara answered. “Somebody else decided he was entitled to use those things without asking.”

“That doesn’t absolve us of being careless.”

“No,” Mara said. “But we can be careful without pretending nobody should ever create anything again.”

They spent the next hour calling parents. Most were bewildered and angry. One father demanded that every picture be destroyed immediately. Another asked whether the investigation would interfere with his daughter’s application to art school. A mother who spoke little English asked Alma to repeat the explanation slowly and then requested that her child’s drawings be returned without copies. Alma agreed. By the time the calls ended, the issue no longer seemed like a dramatic mystery. It was a collection of individual choices that someone had dismissed as inconvenient.

At eleven, a delivery cyclist stopped outside the library with a flat cardboard package addressed to MARA ELLISON, STORY CONSULTANT. Mara had never used that title. Inside was a proof sheet of eight photographs arranged as though they formed a film sequence. The first showed her house in daylight. The second showed a woman approaching the patio. The third showed broken glass. The next five were drawings of people reacting in surprise, opening doors, and running down halls.

A note at the bottom read: FINAL SCENE REQUIRES NATURAL RESPONSE.

Priya examined the sheet without touching it. “That’s the whole plan.”

“Not exactly,” Mara said. “They expected to get a reaction. But why send me a proof now?”

The cyclist said the parcel had been collected that morning from a commercial copy shop. The sender had paid cash. He had only been instructed to deliver it before noon.

Mara photographed the packaging and called Holt. Within minutes the officer asked her to leave the parcel untouched until it could be collected. Alma placed it in a plastic document tray and turned the tray away from the children arriving for afternoon activities.

“Who is supposed to see the last scene?” Mara asked Priya.

“The people attending tonight’s preview.”

“Then they don’t just want to surprise me. They want to show what happens when someone believes she is being watched.”

Priya looked at the image of the broken window. “And if you’d been hurt?”

Mara didn’t answer. Simon had written the injury out of his plan. In a storyboard, broken glass was a thrilling visual effect. On her floor it had been sharp, chaotic, and close enough to her face to leave a nick in her sleeve. He had designed a scene while refusing to acknowledge the actual person standing in it.