The secret to being invisible is consistency.

Same time to the mailbox every morning. Same wave to the neighbors, brief, friendly, forgettable. Same gray Honda in the driveway, same beige house at the end of the cul-de-sac, same data analyst job that glazes people's eyes on contact.

Boring is a superpower. I've spent five years perfecting it.

I stepped into my backyard at 6:47 AM, same as every morning, coffee in hand. The grass was wet with dew, cool against my bare feet. My herb garden stretched along the back fence, rosemary, sage, lavender, mugwort, a few species the neighbors couldn't identify.

They weren't weeds.

I left my mug on the patio railing and knelt in the dirt, fingers pressing into soil that felt like coming home. Closed my eyes. Breathed.

"Good morning," I murmured to the plants. "Let's have a good day."

This was the part where I'd look insane to anyone watching. Arms lifting slowly, palms out, a movement that could be stretching or yoga or absolutely nothing at all. The warmth that flowed from my hands into the ground, invisible, untraceable.

Just a woman doing weird morning exercises in her garden. Nothing to see here.

The basil perked up. The moonflowers, closed tight against the daylight, seemed to lean toward me. I felt the familiar hum of energy cycling through the soil, connecting everything, connecting me.

This was the only time I let myself be real.

Fifteen minutes. That was all I allowed. Fifteen minutes of truth before I showered, dressed in business casual, and drove forty minutes to a cubicle where I made spreadsheets for a company that sold industrial packaging solutions. No one at work knew I talked to plants. No one in the neighborhood knew why my garden grew better than everyone else's.

My grandmother had taught me that the secret to a quiet life was keeping your magic quieter.

I missed her every single day.

The kitchen timer on my phone buzzed. 7:02. Time to be normal.

I gathered my mug, brushing dirt from my knees, and walked back toward the house. The morning was already warming up, August in the suburbs pressing down like a damp blanket. Somewhere down the street, a lawn mower started its weekly drone.

I was almost to my back door when I felt it.

That prickle on the back of my neck. The awareness of being watched.

I turned, scanning the fence line. Mrs. Patterson's house, curtains drawn, no movement. The Henderson place next door, still for sale, still empty. Gerald Whitmore's perfect yard beyond that, his roses blooming in colors that weren't quite natural.

Nothing unusual. But the feeling didn't fade.

Then I saw it. The small black eye of Brenda Kowalski's Ring doorbell, mounted on her front porch across the street. The little blue light that meant it was recording.

It wasn't pointed at her door anymore.

It was angled toward my yard.

I went inside, shut the door harder than necessary, and told myself I was being paranoid. Brenda's doorbell glitched all the time. Had for months now. Randomly turning, catching motion where there wasn't any, sending her alerts about "suspicious activity" that turned out to be squirrels.

I knew why it glitched. I'd hexed it six months ago after she'd made one too many comments about my Amazon deliveries. "Someone's certainly getting a lot of packages. Anything exciting?" Said with that smile, the one that meant she was cataloging information for later use.

A tiny curse. Barely a whisper of intention. Just enough to make the technology hiccup when I walked by.

Harmless.

Probably.

I showered, dressed, and was backing out of my driveway by 7:45. Boring on schedule. I made it to the end of the cul-de-sac before I saw Brenda power-walking toward my house, blonde ponytail swinging, athleisure set coordinated down to her sneakers.

She spotted my car and changed course.

I could have kept driving. Should have. But she was already at my window, tapping on the glass with those lavender-painted nails, and ignoring her would only make things worse.

I lowered the window.

"Ivy." Her smile didn't reach her eyes. "I'm so glad I caught you."

"Morning, Brenda. I'm actually running late for..."

"This will only take a second." She leaned on my door, blocking my escape. "I need to talk to you about something serious."

Dread pooled low in my gut. The doorbell footage. She'd seen something. The stretching, the hand movements, the way the plants responded. Out of context, it probably looked insane. In context, it looked worse.

"Okay." I kept my voice even. Boring. "What's up?"

Brenda's expression shifted to something I'd never seen before. Genuine distress underneath the performative concern.

"It's Maurice," she said.

"Maurice?"

"My sourdough starter." Her voice cracked. "He's dead."

I blinked. "Your... starter. Died."

"Fourteen months, Ivy. Fourteen months I kept him alive. I've made over two hundred loaves with that starter. I have eighteen thousand followers on my sourdough Instagram. And this morning..." She pressed a hand to her chest. "This morning, he was just... gone. Black. Moldy. Dead."

I should have felt sympathy. I did feel sympathy, somewhere under the layers of alarm.

"I'm really sorry," I said. "But I don't understand what this has to do with me."

Brenda's eyes narrowed.

"I've been noticing things," she said slowly. "About you. About your house. The way your garden grows when everyone else's struggles in this heat. The way my doorbell acts up whenever you're around. The way you're always out there in the mornings, doing your... whatever you do."

The alarm was becoming a siren.

"I do yoga."

"You do something." She straightened, crossing her arms. "And I've done my research. I know what bad energy looks like. I know what it can do. And I think..."

"You think I killed your sourdough starter. With bad energy."

Saying it out loud should have made it ridiculous. It did sound ridiculous. But Brenda wasn't laughing.

"I think," she said, "that there's something going on with you. Something you're not telling anyone. And I think it's affecting this neighborhood."

I could have denied it. Could have laughed it off, called her crazy, driven away and hoped she'd forget about it.

But Brenda Kowalski never forgot anything.

And she was looking at me like she could see right through the boring, right through the beige, to whatever was underneath.

"I have to get to work," I said.

She didn't move.

"This isn't over, Ivy." Her voice dropped to something almost sympathetic. "I know you're hiding something. And I'm going to figure out what it is."

She stepped back from my car. I drove away without looking in the rearview mirror, my fingers white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

I didn't kill her sourdough starter. I was almost certain of that.

But I had cursed Gerald's tomatoes last summer.

And I had hexed her doorbell.

And I'd been casting small workings in this neighborhood for five years, never thinking about where all that energy was going.

My phone buzzed. I glanced at the screen.

A notification from the Maple Heights Community Watch Facebook group.

Brenda Kowalski posted: Some neighbors are choosing to bring negative influences to Maple Heights. I won't name names, but we all know who moved here five years ago, and when the problems started.

Forty-seven comments. And counting.

I pulled over to the side of the road and sat there for a long moment, watching the number climb.

This was the opposite of invisible.

I should have stayed home. Called in sick, locked my doors, waited for this to blow over.

Instead, I drove to work, made my spreadsheets, and pretended everything was fine.

But that night, back home, standing in my garden with dirt between my toes, I felt it again.

That prickle on my neck.

The sense of something watching.

Not from Brenda's doorbell this time. From somewhere closer. Somewhere inside the property line.

The kitchen light flickered once, twice, then steadied.

Just old wiring, I told myself.

Just my imagination.

But I went inside early and locked the door behind me.