Every night at 9:47, my phone lit up. “Are you alone?” my son whispered. If I said yes, he vanished. If I said no, he demanded names. The night I lied, he hung up—too fast. Hours later, police lights flooded my street.

“What were you doing outside my house?” I asked quietly.

“To protect you,” he said flatly.

From what?
He didn’t answer.

The police didn’t arrest him that night. Not yet. What they had was disturbing, but not enough—no weapons, no threats, no direct crime. They released him the next morning with a warning and kept the materials.

That’s when the truth started leaking out in fragments.

Caleb had been laid off six months earlier from a private security firm. He never told me. Instead, he filled his days monitoring neighborhood crime reports, building spreadsheets of “patterns,” flagging addresses—including mine.

He believed someone was watching me.