The Camera in the Ceiling

Detective Anita Sorensen has the face of a woman who has been awake since Tuesday.

She stands in your bedroom with gloves on, holding the smoke detector in an evidence bag up to the window light. She's mid-forties, gray streak in her ponytail, reading glasses pushed up into her hair and forgotten there.

"You pulled the battery," she says to Jax.

"Killed the feed. Didn't want him watching us find it."

Sorensen grunts, which could mean anything. "Wireless, battery-backed, streams to a cloud server," she says. "Sold online for about eighty bucks. Somebody knew what they were doing with the install. Clean work."

"How long?" Jax asks.

He hasn't moved from the doorway since she arrived. You're sitting on the edge of the bed, then you remember what the camera was pointed at and stand up fast.

Sorensen glances at him, then glances again, the way women always do with Jax, and then pretends she didn't. She looks at you. "Dust pattern on the housing says weeks. Maybe a month. We'll know more when tech pulls it apart."

A month.

You think about everything you've done in this room in a month. Changed clothes. Cried after the album went gold, alone, for reasons you couldn't explain to anyone. Sang into your phone at three in the morning. Slept.

Somebody watched you sleep.

The room tilts. A hand settles between your shoulder blades, warm and steady, not pushing, just there. You don't have to look to know whose it is. You step away from it anyway.

"I'm fine," you say.

"You're gray," Jax says.

"I'm fine."

He takes his hand back and puts it in his pocket like it did something wrong.

Sorensen watches the whole thing with mild interest. "Ms. Ava, who's been in this house in the last two months? Contractors, guests, anybody."

You make a list. It's short and humiliating. Delia. Darcy. A plumber in August. The landlord's handyman. Callan, once, to drop off a box of your stuff, and he never came past the kitchen.

"Callan Danforth," Sorensen repeats, writing. "The producer."

"Ex-producer. Ex-everything."

"Bad breakup?"

"Is there another kind?"

Sorensen almost smiles. "I'll talk to him."

Garrett Haskins arrives at noon with two bags of groceries and the face of a man who drove too fast.

"I just heard," he says, pushing past Jax at the front door like Jax is a coat rack. "Delia called the whole crew. Are you okay? Are you hurt? I brought soup. I didn't know what you'd want, so I brought everything."

Garrett is your tour production manager, the guy who makes sure the lights hang and the trucks arrive and the stage doesn't fall on anyone. Delia hired him last year. He's thirty-three, tall, sandy-haired and handsome in a clean, scrubbed way, with a pressed button-down and the open, crinkly-eyed face of a youth pastor. He's from Harlow Creek too. His daddy was sheriff back then; now he's a state senator. You barely knew Garrett growing up. He was a couple of years ahead of you in school, a quiet kid who sat in the back of church.

When he showed up in Nashville with a résumé and a smile, it felt like a little piece of home.

"I'm okay," you say, and let him hug you, because it's easier than explaining that you're not.

Over his shoulder, you see Jax.

Jax is looking at Garrett the way you've seen dogs look at snakes in tall grass. Very still. Very quiet. Nothing on his face at all.

Garrett feels it. He lets go of you and turns around.

For a second neither of them says anything.

"Mercer," Garrett says.

"Haskins."

"Didn't know you were back in Tennessee."

"Wasn't, till this morning."

"Huh." Garrett's smile stays on, but something under it goes tight. "Small world."

"Not that small," Jax says.

You look between them. "You two know each other?"

"Everybody knows everybody in Harlow Creek," Garrett says lightly. He turns his back on Jax and starts unpacking soup. "Chicken noodle or tomato? I got the good crackers."

Jax doesn't move from the doorway. He doesn't stop watching Garrett, either. Not for one second, the whole time Garrett is in your kitchen chattering about the tour schedule, the lighting rig, how he's going to personally walk every venue before you set foot in it. Not when Garrett squeezes your hand on his way out and says, "Call me for anything, Ava. Day or night. I mean it."

When the door shuts behind Garrett, you round on Jax.

"What was that?"

"What was what."

"You looked at him like he kicked your dog."

"I don't have a dog."

"Jax."

He picks up the soup Garrett left on the counter, reads the label, and puts it back. "I don't like him."

"You don't like anybody."

"That's true," he says, and walks out to check the perimeter.

By nine that night, you've had enough.

Enough of the techs. Enough of Delia calling every hour. Enough of Jax moving through your house like a shadow that makes coffee. Enough of jumping every time the old oak scrapes the gutter.

You find him in the kitchen, checking the window latch for the third time.

"I want you to go," you say.

He turns.

"Not off the job. Delia will have my head. But out of my house. You can sit in your truck. You can sit in a hotel. You can sit on the moon. I can't…" Your voice is climbing and you can't stop it. "I can't have you in my kitchen like nothing happened. I can't have you knowing where my coffee mugs are. You don't get to be here."

He listens to all of it. He doesn't interrupt. When you're done, the house is very quiet.

"Okay," he says.

You blink. You'd braced for a fight.

"I'll take the porch," he says. "Not the truck. The truck's too far from the door. If something happens, I need to be through it in three seconds, not ten." He picks up his jacket. "Lock the bedroom door behind you."

"Because of you?"

"Because of habit." He pauses in the hall. "And because somebody watched you sleep for a month, and I'm not going to be the reason you can't."

He goes out. The screen door creaks. The porch light comes on.

You lie in the dark with your bedroom door locked and the ceiling bare where the smoke detector used to be. You can see the outline of it, a pale circle on the plaster, like a scar.

You don't sleep. You check the window. You check the lock. Through the blinds you can see him, sitting on the top step with his back against the post, perfectly still, his face turned toward the dark yard and the gravel road beyond it.

Ten years. You had a whole speech. You've been writing it for ten years, in notebooks, in songs, in the shower. Where were you. Why didn't you come. Why didn't you call. Why didn't you ever, ever call.

And you didn't say a word of it. You told him to go sit on the porch.

At 1:14 a.m., your phone lights up on the nightstand.

You know before you look. You'd know if you were blind.

He still has your number. You never changed it. You told yourself it was because the label had it on everything. It wasn't.

The text is one line. All lowercase, the way he always wrote, like capital letters were a waste of his time.

You hold your breath and open it.