…including the night he left your daughter alone to go to the bar. Come over anytime. Bring coffee.” He’d signed it with a little smiley face.
I stood on my porch holding that note for a long time. Part of me wanted to believe him. My ex and I had been fighting over custody of our daughter, Maddie, for eight months, and I had nothing on paper. Just a feeling. And here was a man offering me a notebook full of dates and times.
But I kept thinking about the thin line on the flap of every envelope. The only place he could have learned about the hearing on the 14th was a letter from my lawyer.
I didn’t go over. I called my lawyer, Dana, and read her the note. She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Do not knock on that door. Opening someone’s mail is a federal crime. Send me the video and call the Postal Inspection Service. Today.”
So I did. A postal inspector named Officer Reyes came to my house two days later. She watched the 5:50 a.m. clip three times. Then she asked me a question I hadn’t thought to ask myself. “Has your neighbor ever spoken to your ex-husband?”
I said I didn’t think so. She asked me to check my older footage. It took me most of the night. Then I found it. Four months ago, on a Sunday afternoon when Maddie was with her dad, my ex’s truck was parked in my neighbor’s driveway for almost an hour. The two of them shook hands at the end.
Reyes came back with a warrant the following week. In his garage they found a kettle, a stack of resealed envelopes, and the notebook he’d told me about. There were entries about my ex in it, a few. Most of the pages were about me. What time I left for work. When my lights went off. What I wore. A list of every man who’d ever walked me to my car. And on the inside cover, my ex’s phone number.
Dana figured it out before I did. “He wasn’t offering to help you,” she said. “He was trying to get you over there and get you talking. Anything you said about your ex, anything you said about yourself, it was going straight to the other side.”
At the hearing on the 14th, my ex’s lawyer stood up and said they had a “neighbor witness” who could speak to my parenting. Dana handed the judge Officer Reyes’s report and a printout of that Sunday afternoon in the driveway. The judge read it, took off her glasses, and asked my ex if he’d like a moment with his attorney. He did. They withdrew the witness.
I kept primary custody of Maddie. My neighbor has been charged with mail theft, and the cameras came down the same week. I watched a man in a county uniform take the last one off the pole.
Last weekend Maddie and I took down the privacy screen and planted a row of lilacs along the fence instead. She asked me why we didn’t need the screen anymore. I told her, “Because now the only people looking into our yard are us.”
