Brooks asked permission to contact Kira again.
I agreed.
On the way home I stopped for coffee at a shop where I used to meet clients before the pandemic.
The barista recognized me and asked why I looked tired.
I nearly told her everything.
Instead, I said a family member had been involved in a serious accident.
She handed me the coffee with a napkin wrapped around the cup.
“I hope things get easier,” she said.
The small kindness almost made me cry.
That night I showed Maya the photograph and told her she needed to know someone had watched her at the body shop.
She studied it silently.
“That’s the bus stop where I waited for the Number Four,” she said.
“I thought nobody noticed me.”
“Someone did,” I replied.
“That is why we need to be careful.”
She agreed to change her route for a while and call me if she saw anyone following her.
I tried not to make her feel as though every stranger was a threat.
I also called the school counselor and explained that Maya might need flexibility with assignments.
Her counselor, Ms. Chen, listened without interrupting.
“I’ll make sure she has someone to check in with,” she said.
“But she should still have ordinary days whenever possible.”
I held onto that sentence.
I had started treating normal life as something we could resume after the investigation ended.
Maya needed pieces of it now.
We ordered pizza, argued about which movie to watch, and let the dishes wait until morning.
For two hours the house sounded like itself again.
Then a stone struck the front window.
The glass held, but a spiderweb crack spread from the corner.
Someone shouted from the sidewalk and ran.
Maya flinched so hard that the pizza plate slid off her knees.
My phone was already in my hand.
The newest report brought two officers back to our house before midnight.
One of them found a smooth river stone near the porch, still damp from the lawn.
The neighbor across the street, Mr. Patel, said he had seen a person in a dark jacket run toward the corner.
He could not identify the person or say whether the stone had been thrown from the street.
Gwen later told another neighbor she had heard the sound but had not seen anything.
Her statement was technically consistent with the camera view, which showed no one approaching her front door.
