Then I turned the stove off.
For twenty minutes, I tried not to follow.
I wiped the counter. Moved the paint samples. Checked the window latch in the laundry room because the wind rattled it. Ordinary things. Safe things. Things I could control.
Then my phone rang.
My mother.
“Nora,” she said, breathless. “Are you with Vanessa?”
“She just left.”
“Something is happening at her neighborhood. Your father and I are headed there.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
I looked at the folder on my dining table, the one holding my own inspection notes, survey, soil report, and title documents. The folder my family would have called obsessive if they had known it existed.
“I know property records,” I said.
Mother did not have time to dismiss the sentence. In the background, I heard my father say, “Ask her if she can talk to somebody.”
“Can you talk to somebody?” Mom asked immediately. “You work for the county.”
There it was.
Three weeks of laughing at my job, and now suddenly it was a door they wanted me to open.
“I can’t interfere,” I said. “And I’m not assigned to that matter.”
“Nora, this is your sister’s home.”
“I understand.”
“Then help.”
“I can come,” I said. “I cannot change what is already happening.”
My mother went quiet, which meant she did not like the first honest sentence in the room.
Fairlake Reserve was twenty-five minutes from my house and looked, from the outside, exactly the way people paid to make life look settled. Stone entry monument. Iron gates. Flower beds maintained by a landscaping company whose trucks were always too clean. A pond with a fountain near the guardhouse. Curving streets lined with new trees, their trunks still supported by stakes because the neighborhood had not existed long enough for roots to trust the earth.
By the time I arrived, the gates were open.
Not welcoming open.
Problem open.
County vehicles lined the curb near the first cul-de-sac, along with trucks from engineering firms and a few local news vans that had not yet found the right angle. Residents stood on lawns in yoga pants, golf shirts, bathrobes, and expensive slippers, clutching dogs, toddlers, medication bags, laptops, and framed photos. The scene had a strange, polished panic to it, like a disaster filmed for a real estate commercial before anyone had approved the script.
Vanessa’s house sat halfway down the street, huge and pale and perfect from a distance.
Up close, I could see the crack.