By the fourth week, the pattern had a shape I recognized from my work. A single exception, entered without a note, becomes a recurring entry. A recurring entry, left unchallenged, becomes a line item. I was not yet angry. I was uneasy in the specific way an accountant gets uneasy: the numbers on the page no longer matched the agreement I had made in my head.
I still did not say anything. I watched the gate latch on Thursday afternoons and I kept working, and I told myself that neighborliness required a certain amount of give. What I had not yet understood was that give, without a stated limit, is not neighborliness. It is an open account, and Sandra had begun to draw on it as if the balance were hers to spend.
Sandra asked for the gate code in October, on a day when the pool was already closed for the season in every practical sense except that the water was still in it and the cover had not yet gone on.
She came to the side fence while I was coiling the hose. She did not ask for the code as a convenience. She asked for it as a safety measure, which is a harder thing to refuse.
"Rachel, I have been thinking," she said. "What if something happened while the children were here on a weekend and you were inside, or on the phone? What if someone needed to get in quickly? I am right next door. It would make sense for me to have the code for emergencies."
She said "for emergencies" twice. The second time, she said it more slowly, as if she were underlining it.
I should have asked her what emergency she imagined that required a code rather than a knock on my back door, which was twenty steps from her house. I should have asked why a code for emergencies needed to be a standing code, known in advance, rather than something I could give her in the moment. I did not ask either question, because the word "emergency" made the request sound responsible, and refusing a responsible-sounding request felt petty.
I gave her the code. I said it clearly, once, and I said the condition clearly with it.
"For emergencies only," I said. "Not for regular use. The arrangement is still weekends, when I am home."
"Absolutely," Sandra said. "Emergencies only. I understand completely."
I regretted it within a month. Not in a dramatic way. In the small, accumulating way that most regrets arrive: a detail out of place, then another, then a pattern too plain to explain away.
The first detail was a towel. I came home from the office on a Tuesday evening — Doug's day, so the pool was clean and the deck was ordered — and found a damp towel draped over the coping at the shallow end. I had not swum that day. I had not been in the backyard since the morning. The towel was not mine. It was a bright striped towel I had seen on Sandra's deck rail.
The second detail was the gate itself. I had a habit, from years of living alone, of checking the latch when I came home. One evening the latch was closed but the lock had not engaged. The gate was shut in the way a gate is shut when someone has pulled it to but not pushed it until it clicks. I pushed it until it clicked and stood there for a moment, listening to the street.
The third detail was the water. Doug left his receipt on the kitchen counter on Tuesdays, as he always had, with a short note in his plain handwriting about the chemicals and the skimmer. That month his note said the water level was slightly low and the skimmer basket had leaves in it that did not match my trees. I read the note twice. I did not call Sandra. I told myself a towel and an unlatched gate and a few leaves were not proof of anything, and that accusing a neighbor on the basis of leaves would be exactly the kind of escalation I had been trying to avoid.
But I knew, in the part of my mind that keeps accounts, that the code had changed the arrangement more than any weekday swim had. A knock asks a question. A code answers it in advance. Sandra no longer needed to stand on my step and explain herself. She could let herself in, and the only record of her presence would be the things she left behind: a towel, a gate not quite locked, water that had been disturbed when I was not there to see it.
I did not take the code back. That is the part I have had to sit with. I told myself I would mention it casually, at a natural moment, and no natural moment presented itself, because Sandra was careful not to create one. She never mentioned the code again. She never thanked me for it a second time. It simply became a fact of the property, like the fence itself, and I let it become one because retrieving it would have required a conversation I kept deciding to have tomorrow.