The fourth time he looked directly at me.

Not a glance, not the incidental eye contact you get when two people notice each other in a parking lot. He stopped his walk, turned, and looked at me for what I timed at approximately four seconds. Then he looked back down at the clipboard, made a note — a real one this time, pen moving — and continued the perimeter walk without any other acknowledgment.

Four seconds is not how long it takes to accidentally see someone. Four seconds is a duration you hold deliberately. It is long enough to make a decision and to let the other person know a decision was made. The note he wrote afterward is the part that stays with me. He documented seeing me. Whatever list or log he is maintaining, my presence in the lot is now on it, in ink, in his handwriting, on a form I cannot read.

The three missing minutes of footage from the crosswalk camera cover a timestamp that overlaps with the parking structure where I have seen him. I did not connect these threads until the fourth occurrence because the building in the footage documentation is not the building I live in. It is one lot over. One lot over is close enough to overlap on a perimeter walk if the perimeter extends. I do not know if the perimeters connect. I know that I cannot see the connection point from any window I have access to.

I am not documenting this thread further here because the documentation reaching a specific depth is itself a data point. Whatever is watching the watching, the shape of the record is information. I am redirecting to the footage thread because the overlap is the thing that matters now, not the continuation of this branch.