"Mom was usually right when she was angry."
He looked through the window toward the garage. "And Dad, don't ask me to call anybody in uniform. I work in another county. Even if I didn't, I shouldn't be fixing this with my badge."
"I wasn't going to ask."
He gave me the raised eyebrow. "Good. Because I know that face. It means you're considering something stubborn."
We ate the food while the truck cooled in the driveway. Later Marcus helped me move it inside the garage where no one could claim to mistake it for abandoned property. I hated giving Delilah even that much, but the Ford needed protection, and I was beginning to understand that choosing the right battleground was not the same as surrendering.
The next letter arrived a week later. It was taped to my door rather than delivered through the mail, and the heading demanded that I immediately remove my security cameras because they supposedly violated neighborhood privacy standards. The notice described my garage camera as an unauthorized surveillance installation and claimed that residents had complained about being watched.
There were two problems with that. First, the cameras had been installed after jewelry disappeared during an estate sale three months after Sarah's funeral. Second, they covered my driveway, the garage approach, and the rear garden; I had aimed them away from neighboring windows precisely because I had no interest in anybody else's private life.
I asked Jerome Santos to look at them. He was thirty-four and worked in corporate cybersecurity, but unlike some young men in technology he did not seem to believe that owning three monitors made him a constitutional scholar. He examined the system, reviewed the local ordinances, and warned me against treating a camera's location as an automatic answer to every privacy question.
"Video of your own driveway is a different matter from secretly recording confidential conversations," he said. "And those online claims about everything being legal in all fifty states? Ignore them. State laws, audio rules, placement, and expectations of privacy all matter."
I appreciated the caution. Too many people in this dispute were using certainty as camouflage for laziness. Jerome helped me adjust camera angles, add a plainly visible recording notice, and save original files with consistent dates rather than relying on edited clips.
He also installed a protected backup. The system was not elaborate, and he insisted we document the settings so we could explain what the cameras did rather than asking anyone to trust a mysterious black box. When Delilah entered my driveway again, the video would show what happened from beginning to end.
Within two days she returned to complain about the cameras. She walked past the sign saying VIDEO SURVEILLANCE IN USE, pointed at the lens, and accused me of creating a hostile environment for community leadership. I asked whether she needed any help finding the sidewalk, and she threatened to report my system to the city.
The inspector arrived the following Tuesday. He was a middle-aged man named Owen Ruiz with a patient expression and a clipboard marked by years of field use. He said the city had received complaints about unpermitted electrical work and asked permission to inspect the camera installation.