PART 2
The dispatcher kept me on the line.
“Ma’am, I have officers heading to the address now. Can you stay with me?”
“Yes.”
My voice sounded strange to me. Flat. Far away. Like it belonged to a woman calmly reporting a fender bender, not a woman watching her ex-husband carry a flat-screen television into the home she’d bought to finally get away from him.
On the screen, Vanessa came back out of the side door. She stretched her arms over her head, then pulled her sunglasses from her hair and settled them on her nose. She looked relaxed.
She looked like a woman who was home.
“Diane,” Rachel whispered. “Breathe.”
I hadn’t realized I’d stopped.
“Ma’am,” the dispatcher said, “you mentioned the door has a keypad. Do you have an app for it? Some of those systems keep a record.”
A record.
I hadn’t even thought of it.
When the locksmith installed the keypad, he’d shown me how to set up different codes for different people. “That way,” he’d said, tapping his own phone screen, “you’ll always know who came in and when. Contractors get their own. Family gets their own. You can delete any of them with one tap.”
I’d set up three codes.
Mine.
One for the contractor finishing the back porch.
And one emergency code.
I’d given that third one to exactly one person.
“Hold on,” I told the dispatcher.
My hands were shaking so badly that I mistyped my password twice. Rachel took the phone from me, entered it, and handed it back.
The app opened to a simple list.
Side Door — Unlocked — 10:21 AM.
And beneath it, in small gray letters, the name of the code that had been used.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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