This is part 4 of the serialized story What Brings You Back Home. Go here to start at the beginning. Paid subscribers can listen to the first three segments of this story here. Thank you for reading!
It’s 11:01 p.m. when she pulls into Plantation Estates. She leaves the headlights off, rolls slowly through the azalea-covered entrance. She’s charted it all out on Google maps. She has photos of the house from Zillow. Not just photos but an actual walk-through, a video. How many times did she mute the Muzac and watch that walk-through in slow-motion? The entryway, the living room, the open-plan kitchen, up the stairs to the master bedroom, down the stairs to the basement fitness room.
She de-activated the Nest Cam online before she drove into the neighborhood. She did it from the parking lot of a motel on Government Street, connecting as a guest to the motel’s free wifi. The motel’s password was easy to figure out—Guest2018.
So was the Senator’s. He’s a rabid Bama fan, graduated from undergrad in 1990 and from the law school in 1992, just a year before Rebecca completed her BA in engineering. Maybe they crossed paths on the quad at some point during those years. Maybe they shared the same view of Denny Chimes from the second floor of the library. Maybe they even sat at adjacent booths at the Kwik Snack on University Boulevard. If he’d had a daughter, he has said in interviews, he would have named her Bama.
Four tries and she was in: Bama92. It doesn’t matter how much you tell people about the fragility of their “smart homes,” they will continue to choose bad passwords, certain of their own capacity to forget, less certain that the world could mean them harm.
By noon tomorrow, she knows, the wife and sons will be heading home, converging in a cloud of shock and grief, a thousand unanswered questions. She feels bad for the sons, not necessarily for the wife.