The Wi-Fi was the thread I pulled. Nobody had my password. I had never written it on a card, never texted it, never said it out loud across a table. So when devices I did not own started showing up on the network, there was only one explanation. Somebody had been inside the house, at the router, reading the sticker on the back.

I drove out after my shift. Forty minutes on no sleep. The lake road is familiar enough that being tired can still find the turn on its own. The spare key was gone from the lockbox that I thought only I knew the code to. The box looked untouched until you opened it and found empty space where the key should have been.

My brother had the code. I had given it to him two years earlier for a single afternoon, when a plumber needed to get in and I could not leave a floor at work. One afternoon. He had photographed the keypad and shared it in a group chat I was not part of. There was a second chat, it turned out. Something like forty of my relatives, and not me. Forty people discussing a house as though a calendar invite created a right to it.

They had been using the place for two years. A Memorial Day. Two Fourth of Julys. A christening I had been told was held at a rented hall. There were photographs. My mother in my kitchen with a dish towel in her hand, as if the towel came with the season. An aunt in the main bedroom I keep for no one, the quilt turned down. A cousin’s boyfriend had cracked the dock railing at some point and nobody had ever mentioned it, because mentioning it meant admitting they had all been there.