“Give me that camera!” Patricia Bell shouted from my front porch.

“It belongs to me!”

I stared at the black device in my hand and wondered whether the woman had forgotten how ridiculous that sounded.

“Then why was it hidden behind the clock in my living room?” I asked.

“I’m calling the police because you stole my property,” she said.

She lifted her own phone and pointed its camera through my screen door.

My name is Marcus Bennett, and I was forty-one when the quietest room in my house became evidence of a crime.

I had owned the white two-story house on Fenton Avenue for eleven years.

I knew the crack in the fourth porch step, the groan of the refrigerator before its compressor started, and the spot where afternoon sun always landed across my mother’s old piano.

I thought knowing a house meant knowing when someone else had entered it.

I was wrong.

The camera had been wedged behind a mantel clock on the bookshelf directly opposite my couch.

A wire no thicker than dental floss disappeared beneath the base of the clock.

The lens faced the space where I had discussed my finances with my younger brother, conducted a private job interview, and argued with my girlfriend about whether we had a future together.

The device could also see the entrance to the bedroom hallway.

My fingers shook so badly that I had to grip it with both hands.

Patricia pounded again, hard enough to rattle the doorframe.

“You’ve got three seconds to return what you took,” she warned.

“Call whoever you want,” I replied.

She looked down at the small blue light on the device.

“That light should be red,” she said before she caught herself.

I felt something cold settle beneath my ribs.

I had disconnected the device seven minutes earlier, and she was already standing outside.

Her knowledge of its status told me far more than her claim of ownership.

I did not open the door.

I kept my phone recording and dialed the nonemergency number that connected me with dispatch.

While I explained what I had found, Patricia told someone on her own phone that I had become unstable after surgery.

She spoke loudly enough for me to hear every word.

“He’s paranoid, and he’s holding equipment that belongs to the association,” she said.

A police cruiser appeared at the end of Fenton Avenue twelve minutes later.

By then Patricia was standing on my steps with the satisfied posture of someone who expected the authorities to finish her argument for her.