After thirty seconds or so I get to my hands and knees, then ever so slowly move my head to peek over the roof’s edge. I freeze. Even without the night vision binoculars, I can see the shape of a man at the back corner of the warehouse, cradling something in his hands. I’m pretty sure it’s not a baby. I don’t pull back, not wanting his peripheral vision to catch the movement. He takes a step forward, then another. He stops as if listening, his head slowly turning as he scans the trees, then the trailer. If he looks up, he might catch the outline of my head against the night sky.

Someone calls out from the back of the warehouse. The man down below turns to look behind him, and when he does I pull my head back and then slowly crawl away from the roof’s edge. The roof is gritty and still radiates the day’s heat. I hear the man below respond, then nothing. After I’ve crawled a few yards, I stand up, far enough away from the edge that no one on the ground would be able to see me. My right leg is pins and needles now as feeling returns, the knee a dull throb, but nothing is broken—it just hurts. I don’t hear any more voices, only the distant hum of traffic on Fulton Industrial and, beyond that, I-20.

This isn’t the first roof I’ve been on. It’s not even the first warehouse roof I’ve been on. That realization makes me smile, although the smile feels sort of like a painting that hangs crooked on a wall. Most women my age have a regular job, are dating someone or already married, maybe even have a kid or two. Right now those other women are tucking their kids in bed, snuggling on the couch with their boyfriends or husbands, watching Netflix. Me, I’m two stories up, walking on an enormous flat surface over half the size of a football field, getting ready to spy on a meeting between two guys who should be in prison. If my parents could only see me now. But behind that thought is the warm pulse of a childhood memory: standing in a treehouse, pretending I was on a ship sailing through the branches of an oak tree, my father grinning up at me from the foot of the ladder. What do you think, Suzie Q? my father asked, and with joy rising like a sun in my chest I called back, It’s awesome, Daddy!