The tire tracks deepened. They no longer curved cautiously along the edges but carved directly through the center of his yard. The lines were clean and confident—habitual. Clarence would come out each morning and find new things disturbed: mulch displaced, flower stems broken, a solar light snapped clean in half.
Once, he found a tulip bulb dug up and flattened into the soil like it had been run over, twice. That one stung. Helen had planted those bulbs. He’d kept them going every year since she passed. Watching them sprout each spring had always brought him a strange, quiet comfort.