The footage showed everything. His van at the curb at 9:14 in the morning. The box with the cold pack label, marked perishable in big blue letters. The toss, underhand, into the low spot by my driveway where the rain collects. And the photo he took of it sitting in the puddle before he drove away, marked delivered.
I told him I had already sent it to the company, to their safety team, and to the pharmacy that shipped it.
He stopped laughing.
My neighbor, Mrs. Harmon, set down her mower handle and walked over. She said she had two of my packages from her bushes that month and she had photos of both. She said she would send them wherever I needed.
For four months I was the customer who scams for refunds, and one twenty second video from my own front door said otherwise.
The first call I made that day was not to the delivery company. It was to our pediatrician. The nurse called the pharmacy directly, and they had an emergency supply ready for pickup within two hours. The pharmacist told me never to try to stretch it again, and to call them first any time a shipment went wrong. She said they would rather replace ten boxes than have one kid go without.
My daughter had been quietly skipping doses to make the last box last. I did not know until that week. She is fourteen. She did not want to worry me about money. I held her for a long time that night.
The delivery company called me back the next morning. A regional supervisor named Andre. He had watched the footage and pulled the GPS logs for my address going back four months. He said there were eleven deliveries marked complete at times the van was not on my street.
He apologized. He did not read it off a script. The company reimbursed me for the insulin, and for every other damaged package I had reported. He set up a flag on my address so all medical shipments had to be handed to a person, with a signature.
The driver was taken off the route. Andre told me something else, off the record. The driver had been given seventy more stops a day since summer than any human could make. He was cutting corners to keep up. That did not excuse what he did. But Andre said they were fixing the routes too.
The new driver is a young woman named Keisha. She rings the bell every single time. When she sees the cold pack label, she waits until one of us opens the door.
My daughter made her a thank you card in December. Keisha taped it to her dashboard.
Mrs. Harmon and I have coffee on Thursday mornings now. She says she misses finding surprises in her bushes.
My daughter has not missed a dose since. And every shipment now comes to the door, into our hands, dry.