Skip to content A moving truck arrived early Saturday morning.
Boxes disappeared into it.
Cars were packed.
They clearly wanted the process finished as quickly as possible.
As Emma climbed into the car, she looked toward me.
She was seventeen.
Whatever mistakes her parents had made, she was still a teenager who had followed the adults around her.
I raised my hand.
She raised hers.
Then they drove away.
That evening, Tom and I used the hot tub.
The November air was cold enough that thick clouds of steam rose from the water.
Our other neighbors, Frank and Helen, had their lights on next door.
Everything sounded wonderfully ordinary.
Tom poured two glasses of wine.
After several quiet minutes, I said:
“Frank and Helen never used our hot tub.”
Tom laughed.
“Not that we know of.”
I smiled.
“Good thing the camera faces the right direction.”
For a while, we said nothing.
I thought about everything that had happened.
Lisa standing at our door pretending to complain.
The camera footage.
The green dye.
The confrontation.
Diane’s message.
The rental listing.
Detective Hartley.
Jim returning to our house and offering me the smallest possible version of the truth.
Eventually, I realized the hot tub itself had never really been the center of the story.
The real issue was entitlement.
Jim had looked at something that belonged to someone else and decided it was being wasted.
Because we weren’t using it often, he convinced himself there was nothing wrong with using it himself.
Then he discovered he could profit from it.
And each time nothing happened, the line moved a little further.
At no point did he seem to think of himself as someone doing something seriously wrong.