My daughter went away to scout camp for a week, and I was so relieved when she sent me a photo — but after I looked at it more closely, I frantically called the camp.

The responding officers found the back door unlocked.

I had locked it that morning.

I lock it every morning.

It is the last thing I do before I leave the house, the same way it is the last thing I do before I go to bed.

I have done it for fourteen months without exception, since the night Danny moved out and I changed the locks and stood in my kitchen at midnight making sure every point of entry was secured.

The back door was unlocked.

Nothing appeared disturbed at first.

The officers walked through with me room by room.

The television was there.

My laptop was on the kitchen table where I'd left it.

Lily's room was untouched.

The jewelry box in my bedroom — not valuable, mostly sentimental — was closed and undisturbed.

Then I went to my office.

The filing cabinet was closed.

Locked, as always.

I keep the key on my keychain, and my keychain had been with me all morning.

But when I unlocked it and opened the second drawer, I knew immediately.

The folders were in the wrong order.

It's a small thing.

It would mean nothing to anyone else.

But I am precise about that drawer.

The financial disclosure documents were always at the front — my lawyer's instruction, so I could access them quickly.

They were now behind the insurance folder.

Behind the utility records.

Pushed back as though someone had rifled through and replaced them in a hurry.

The documents themselves were still there.

But on top of them, sitting at an angle that was wrong, was a single sheet of paper that did not belong.

I picked it up.

It was a printed photograph.

Grainy, taken from a distance, clearly from a phone camera with a long zoom.

It showed the front of my house.

My car in the driveway.

Lily walking to the front door with her backpack on.

There was a date stamp in the corner.

Two weeks ago.

I turned it over.

On the back, in handwriting I didn't recognize, were four words.

*You should be careful.*

Officer Reyes was standing in the doorway.

I held up the paper without speaking.

She crossed the room, put on a glove, and took it from me.

She looked at the front.

Then the back.

Her expression didn't change, but she went very still in the way that told me this had moved into different territory.

"I need to make a call," she said.

"Who are you calling?"

"My sergeant.

And I'd like to get a detective involved." She looked at me directly.

"This isn't a custody dispute anymore."

I sat down in my desk chair.

The room was quiet.

From somewhere outside I could hear a neighbor's lawn mower, a completely ordinary sound, and it felt surreal in the way that ordinary sounds do when something has gone badly wrong.

"The figure in the photo," I said.

"The one behind the tree at camp.

Do you think it was the same person?"

Reyes considered her answer.

"I think someone has been watching your family for at least two weeks.

Possibly longer.

I think this morning was coordinated.

The photo sent from your daughter's number, your ex-husband's arrival at the camp — whether or not those two things are connected — the result was the same.

You left the house."

"And someone came in."

"And someone came in," she said.

"But they didn't take the documents."

"No."

"They left you a message instead."

I looked at the filing cabinet.

At the drawer still hanging open.

At the careful disorder of folders that were almost right but not quite.

"They wanted me to know they'd been here," I said.

"Yes."

"They wanted me to be afraid."