As my father’s daughter, I had an extravagant number of his beautiful family photos, matted at the Papierie in identical museum-quality frames. There was a lush image of me in a white dress, sitting with newborn Stefan in my arms, among fabric-draped knolls that looked like a collection of clouds. There was Stefan, at twelve, hoisting a glistening bass on a line; Jep and Stefan grinning at each other after the All-Conference football championship. And an addition that my father recently took, one with my stubborn hopefulness and my father’s tenderness on display, of Stefan in a torn tee shirt leaning out of the window of his truck, the bed of which looked like a parade float, mounded with barrels and baskets and clay pots filled with flowers. On the wall nearby was one of Jep, Stefan and me on an expanse of white steps above the blue, blue Aegean, taken in Santorini the summer after Stefan’s sophomore year of high school, a trip my parents hosted for our whole family. To each of these photos, someone had taken a black marker and blackened out Stefan’s eyes—not on the photos themselves, but on the glass covering the images. Whoever did this hadn’t stopped with the photos in the living room. Blighted also was the photo of Stefan and Belinda on Stefan’s nightstand. Circles as small as periods blackened out Stefan’s newborn eyes; bigger blots canceled his eyes in the photo with the truck. Over those other photos—of my father’s parents and of me and Alzy Hodge on election day, giant X’s were drawn in black. My first move was to check my cherished photo albums, a parade of road trips, lost teeth, first days of school, the groundbreaking for the addition to this house five years ago, all lined up in dated order on the lowest bookshelf. But the photos in those albums were unmarked.

“I don’t get this,” Jep said. “But I do know now what they mean when they say people who are burglarized feel violated.”

Julie said, “Is Stefan home?”

Jep said, “So far as I know, he’s at work. No, wait. He left a note. He went to Milwaukee with Will for something.”

“Did they break a lock or a window?” Julie said.

The moment she said it, I knew exactly how someone had gained entry. The sliding glass door that led from our basement onto a small patio was just a hair short of flush, and impossible to lock. I was always going to get it replaced; but it was expensive, and even with the protestors, I felt who cared? And as creepy as the hooded figure was, I never actually felt he would come threaten us in our home. It was Portland, Wisconsin, after all. And real crime in Portland was about as common as pineapple plants.

I told Jep about the glass door.