Gwen arrived while they were still measuring the road.

She wore a raincoat over a silk blouse and carried a thermos of coffee nobody had requested.

“Such a horrible accident,” she said, touching my elbow.

Then she looked at Maya.

“Are you sure you didn’t see the driver?”

Maya told her what she had told the police.

Gwen’s eyes narrowed at the mention of the stripe.

“Rain does strange things to colors,” she said.

The following morning, Gwen’s adult son Evan stopped parking his gray pickup in the driveway.

He started using a rented sedan and told the other neighbors his truck needed a transmission repair.

I noticed the change because his pickup had always been parked beneath the same sycamore tree.

Evan was thirty-two, a contractor who had lost two jobs that year and still let his mother introduce him as a business owner.

He had never been warm to us, but he had once helped Maya recover a basketball from the drainage ditch.

I did not accuse him of anything.

A truck with a stripe was hardly proof, and grief could make a person see patterns where none existed.

But three days after the accident, someone pulled the wires from the motion sensor at my garage.

The following night, a flowerpot was thrown through the window of my bookkeeping office.

On Sunday, a note appeared beneath my windshield wiper.

It contained seven words written in black marker.

“Your daughter should learn to keep quiet.”

I photographed the note and called the nonemergency police line.

The officer who took the report advised me to keep the original and document any further damage.

He also warned me not to confront anyone without evidence.

I agreed.

Then I went into my garage and checked the small silver box beneath the workbench.

Its green indicator light was still blinking.

The silver box controlled three outdoor cameras and one sensor over the side gate.

I had installed the system myself after a contractor repeatedly left tools outside while renovating the garage.

The cameras fed into a local recorder rather than a cloud service because our internet connection often failed during storms.

Gwen had seen the obvious garage camera but had never noticed the narrow lens hidden beneath the wooden bird feeder on the back fence.

The feeder had belonged to my father, and its weathered roof blended into the climbing roses.

On the night Lena was struck, that lens had been aimed toward the service road.