Luke reached for his smartphone and opened the camera.
Then he calmly replied, "I'm not accusing anyone. I'm documenting what the water is doing."
For the first time since he'd known her, Celeste appeared genuinely frightened.
She stared at the dye.
Then glanced toward the narrow strip of landscaping separating his backyard from the neighborhood's shared property.
Luke followed her gaze.
And suddenly, he understood that the woman in his pool might have been hiding something much more important than repeated unauthorized swimming.
Eight months earlier, Luke Bennett believed his biggest problem was deciding whether to replace the aging backyard fence before winter.
He'd purchased the house in Cedar Ridge Estates almost three years earlier. The property stood in a comfortable American suburb outside Raleigh, North Carolina, with light-gray siding, white-framed windows, a clean concrete patio, and a rectangular swimming pool surrounded by blue decorative tiles.
Luke was a construction project manager who specialized in commercial renovations. He'd spent his twenties learning how buildings worked, beginning as an apprentice carpenter before completing additional education in construction management.
He understood framing, drainage, mechanical systems, and the importance of keeping accurate project records.
He also understood that expensive mistakes often began with small assumptions nobody bothered to verify.
His father had taught him that.
Michael Bennett had worked as a residential builder for more than thirty years. He wasn't famous or wealthy, but he took pride in doing work correctly. He taught Luke how to read plans, measure twice, and recognize when someone was hiding poor workmanship beneath an attractive finish.
When Luke was sixteen, his father took him to a construction site where a subcontractor had installed a wall incorrectly.
The mistake wasn't obvious.
The surface looked straight.
But Michael studied the measurements and immediately realized something was wrong.
Luke asked whether they could leave it because nobody would notice.
His father shook his head.
"Somebody always notices eventually."
"Even if it's behind the wall?"
"Especially then."
Michael made the subcontractor correct the work before the next stage proceeded.
That afternoon, Luke learned a lesson he'd carry into adulthood: the things hidden beneath a finished surface were often more important than the things people admired from a distance.
Luke bought his house after several years of saving.
He wasn't a millionaire.
He didn't own a construction empire.