The candle had been burning.
The electrical wires had been cleanly cut.
The kitchen camera had disappeared for fourteen minutes.
And Evan had known about the candle without me telling him.
None of those things, taken alone, gave me a complete answer. Together, they made it impossible for me to keep treating the morning as nothing more than an unfortunate accident.
I kept the activity I had downloaded on my phone. I didn’t change anything else while Maya waited outside. I was no longer interested in guessing what had happened before I had the details in front of me.
The most unsettling part was not even the missing camera footage. It was the timing.
The camera went offline at 4:12 a.m. The network history showed EVAN-IP15 at 4:18 a.m. The camera returned at 4:26.
Fourteen minutes separated the camera’s disappearance from its return, and the device associated with Evan appeared in the middle of that gap.
I went back to the activity screen and checked the entries again, reading them slowly rather than trusting my first reaction. The television, thermostat, tablet, and printer were all devices I recognized. Their presence inside the house made sense.
EVAN-IP15 was different.
It appeared only once.
I thought about Evan telling me not to panic. I thought about him asking specifically about the candle. I thought about the spare key sitting in the blue bowl the night before and being gone that morning.
For the first time since I had smelled the gas, I stopped asking myself what accident could have caused all of this.
I started asking myself who had access to the house.
The answer to that question was much smaller than the list of things I had been trying to explain.
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