I did not install that second camera to catch my son.

I want that understood, because it matters to me.

When Henry was dying, and I was often out of the house at appointments and pharmacies and the hundred errands that dying requires, I had grown afraid of the ordinary things that happen to homes and to the people in them, a fall, a fire, an intruder while I was gone.

The camera in the smoke detector was for that, for the perfectly reasonable fears of a woman whose husband could no longer protect the house and who would soon be alone in it.