I wrote his words down that evening, as close to verbatim as I could remember them, and I dated the note. Then I made a decision, sitting at the same kitchen table where I had debated confrontation versus record the previous autumn. I would log daily. Not when I remembered. Not when something dramatic happened. Daily. If Sandra swam, I would write it. If she did not, I would write that too, because an empty day is also information, and a log with gaps invites the argument that the writer only recorded what suited her.
Daily logging is a discipline, and I understood what it would cost. It would cost attention, every morning and every evening, for months. It would cost the easy fiction that I was simply being neighborly. It would cost me the pool itself in a certain way, because I would no longer be able to swim in it without also observing it, and observation changes the thing observed. I accepted those costs, because the alternative — another summer of Thursday exceptions and morning laps and coolers and the word "ours" — had already shown me its price, in chemical bills and cloudy water and a gate code I could not retrieve with a smile.
On March 3, I wrote the first entry. On March 4, I wrote the second: Sandra again, morning laps, gate latched properly that time, which I recorded with the same care, because fairness required it. The notebook, which had sat blank on the shelf for only a short time, began to fill in my handwriting, one dated line at a time. I did not yet know how long the log would run. I did not yet know what it would eventually need to show. I knew only that I had chosen a method that matched my character: I would not shout, and I would not guess, and I would not rely on memory. I would write it down, every day, until the record balanced in a way the arrangement no longer did.
April arrived with the kind of weather that made the pool look inevitable. The cover was off. The water was clear again, or clear enough that a casual glance would not have told you anything was wrong. I stood in my kitchen one Saturday morning and watched the light move across the surface, and I decided that I had spent long enough writing things down without saying them out loud.
I walked next door to 16 Cloverfield Road in the afternoon. Sandra was in her front garden, pulling weeds with the brisk competence of a woman who liked a task to look finished. She stood when she saw me, brushed soil from her hands, and smiled as if my visit were a pleasant surprise rather than something she must have known was coming.
I kept it simple. I said that I wanted to go back to the arrangement we had started with. Weekends only. Afternoons only. When I was home. Her household only. I did not raise my voice. I did not list grievances. I did not mention the gate code, or the cooler, or the weekday mornings, or the new neighbor who had been told the pool was ours. I said that the pool needed rest between uses, that the chemicals were getting expensive, and that I wanted the original terms back. It was all true, and it was also the politest version of the truth I could assemble.
Sandra agreed warmly. She put a hand on my arm and said of course, absolutely, she understood completely. She said she had never meant to take advantage. She said weekends were fine, weekends were what they had always done, really. She laughed a little, as if the whole thing had been a misunderstanding between friends. She asked if I wanted coffee. I said no, thank you, I had work to do. We parted on the path between our houses with smiles that would have looked, to anyone watching, like a problem solved.
I went home and wrote down what she had said, word for word as best as I could remember it. I dated the entry. I underlined the word weekends. Then I waited to see whether the agreement would survive contact with a weekday.
It did not survive the following week.
On April 9, a Thursday, Sandra was in the pool by mid-morning. I heard the gate before I saw her, a familiar click that I had come to notice the way an accountant notices a figure that does not foot. She swam laps for forty minutes. She left a towel on the coping. I wrote it down: date, time, description. No commentary. The log was not a diary. I had already decided that, even if I did not yet have Priya's words for it.
On April 12, a Sunday that should have been unremarkable, Maya and Jonah were in the pool with two friends I did not recognize. That was a weekend, and I was home, so the day itself was within the terms. The guests were not. I watched from the kitchen window for a minute, long enough to be certain, and then I wrote it down. I did not go out. I did not correct anyone. I told myself I was gathering a pattern, and that was true, but it was also true that I was still avoiding a second conversation that would be harder than the first.