She pointed again, her whole hand trembling with fury. “Look!”
I stepped past her onto the porch to see whatever she was pointing at, and I very nearly burst out laughing right there in my slippers, coffee breath and all.
Sitting in the middle of Denise’s driveway was her car, completely covered in white paint. Not splashed. Not streaked here and there for effect. Fully covered, hood to trunk, roof, doors, windows, mirrors, headlights, every surface coated in thick white paint. Whoever had done it had been every bit as thorough as whoever had ruined mine two weeks earlier.
For a second I just stood there taking it in. Then I covered my mouth with one hand, unable to help myself.
Denise spun toward me, practically vibrating. “You think this is funny?”
“No,” I said, though my face was clearly betraying me. “I think it’s familiar.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You did this.”
“I was asleep.”
“That’s exactly what you’d say.”
I looked past her at the car again, more carefully this time. There were paint trays sitting near the front tires. Two rollers had been left lying on the pavement, abandoned. A half-empty bucket sat near the passenger door, its lid nowhere in sight. Something about that detail nagged at me. Whoever had painted my car had taken absolutely everything with them when they left. No rollers. No buckets. No trace at all, beyond the paint itself. This was different. Sloppier. Angrier.
I glanced back toward my own front door, and suddenly I remembered the cameras. My amusement drained away instantly.
“Wait,” I said.
Denise crossed her arms tighter across her chest. “What?”
“I installed cameras after my car was painted.”
Her expression shifted, just slightly, but I caught it.
“Pull it up,” she demanded, following me inside without waiting for an invitation.
“I am,” I said, my hands already shaking a little as I opened the app on my phone.
For days those cameras had shown me nothing more exciting than the mail carrier, a few squirrels chasing each other across the lawn, and one particularly determined neighborhood cat that seemed to inspect my porch every single morning like it was patrolling for a living. Now I scrolled backward through the footage from the previous night, my thumb moving faster and faster across the screen.
Denise stood so close behind me I could hear her breathing, quick and shallow.
“Go faster,” she said.
“I’m trying.”
At 2:14 in the morning, movement appeared near the edge of the frame. I stopped scrolling immediately.
A pickup truck rolled slowly into view, headlights off, crawling along the street like it didn’t want to wake the neighborhood.
Denise leaned in closer. “Who is that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
The truck came to a stop directly in front of her house. A man climbed out of the driver’s seat. Then another man got out from the passenger side. Together they opened the truck bed and began unloading buckets, moving with the kind of quiet efficiency that suggested they’d done this exact thing before, or at least had planned it out carefully.
Denise went completely still beside me.
One of the men walked straight toward her driveway. The other followed close behind, carrying two paint rollers under one arm.
I looked over at Denise. All the color had drained from her face.
“You know them,” I said.
“No.”
“You do.”
“I said I don’t.”
On the screen, the men began painting her car. They worked fast, not carefully exactly, but efficiently, like a job they wanted done and gone. One took the driver’s side, the other the passenger side. They coated the windows first, then moved to the doors, the hood, the trunk, sweeping the rollers in long, practiced strokes.
Denise stared at my phone, transfixed. “This is insane,” she whispered.
I almost agreed out loud. Then something happened on the footage that neither of us expected.
A third person stepped down out of the truck. A woman. She stood beneath the streetlight for several seconds, just watching, before finally walking toward the driveway to join the two men.
Denise made a strange, choked sound in the back of her throat. “Oh my God.”
I looked over at her. “Who is she?”
Denise didn’t answer. Her eyes stayed locked on the screen.
On camera, the woman lifted her own phone and started filming the two men painting the car, documenting it deliberately, purposefully. Then she turned and walked directly toward my house.
My stomach tightened. “Why is she coming over here?”
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