Chapter 3
BILLIE
My brain was all over the place as I put the finishing touches on my makeup to get ready for my niece’s party. I couldn’t stop replaying the night before. The intruder, the note, and the realization that my sense of safety in my own apartment had been some sort of illusion.
Ordinarily, I was a rock. A force to be reckoned with.
If either of my sisters were the one being stalked, I’d have played a stalker Uno reverse card on the perpetrator.
I’d have not only identified the culprit, but I’d also have the man’s name, social security number, and credit score by the end of business that day.
I would then decide whether to involve law enforcement or take matters into my own hands.
No one, and I mean no one, fucked with my family.
But this was happening to me, and it was all I could do to keep my hands from shaking as I swiped on eyeliner. I willed myself to keep it still. The line came out sharp, winged, perfect. Turns out, even in full fight-or-flight, my need for order and control overrode basic survival chemistry.
The truth was I felt cracked open. Raw. Like someone had reached inside my chest and started chipping away at my soul with a chisel and a hammer. I was second-guessing myself, which was not a behavior I was familiar with. I gave it one star, would not recommend.
My mind was flip-flopping over whether or not I should have called my sisters last night. I didn’t. Whether or not I should have gone to stay at a hotel. I didn’t. Whether or not I should have gone down to the police station and filed the report immediately. I didn’t.
The police officer came and cleared the apartment, took my statement, and bagged the note that read: Did you really think I would just go away?
He also asked if I had somewhere to stay.
I told him no, but that I was fine, locked the door, activated my alarm, and spent the entire night tossing and turning and trying not to think about the fact that someone had been in my apartment.
Someone who had left a not-so-veiled threat.
Was that the correct response? Probably not. I should have probably done a million different things. But all I wanted was for this not to be happening, for the whole thing to be some mistake that I could rationalize away with logic and coffee.
Today was a new day. I just wanted to put this behind me and feel safe in the space that was my home. The one place I should feel safe now felt totally foreign to me.
I pushed all those thoughts out of my mind as I went through the motions: shoes, purse, phone, keys, exit.
I checked the alarm and lock three times before heading down to the elevator, bracing myself for the faint, lingering smell of weed from the college kids two doors down.
My building, Windsor Arms, the building I’d wanted to live in since I was a kid, a city-block-long monument to early-2000s gentrification, had all the usual suspects: a dodgy elevator, a laundry room that doubled as a narcotics exchange on weekends, and a front doorman/security guard named Kenny who was more familiar with Hot Pockets than actual security protocols, but he was sweet, and he did take his job to protect the building and residents seriously.
But what was he gonna do with a flashlight? Shine an intruder to death?
Still, I had felt weirdly safer in the chaos and anonymity of this place than anywhere else. Maybe because I knew how to disappear here. Maybe because my sisters never wanted to visit, so I didn’t have to be ‘on duty’ here.
My car was in the sub-basement garage, which, thanks to shoddy lighting and the lens of my recent experience, now felt like the set of a horror movie.
I walked to my Tesla double-time, clutching my pepper spray in one hand and my phone in the other.
When I got in and locked the door, I exhaled.
It was silly, really. What did I think was going to happen to me on the walk from the lobby to my car at 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning?
I turned to place my purse on the passenger seat, and my heart seized in my chest. There was a note waiting for me, placed neatly on the passenger seat.
The handwriting was the same as before: a little too deliberate, a little too neat, bleeding through the paper.
The words were covered by the folded paper, so I couldn’t see what it said without touching it, and the idea of touching that paper made my skin crawl.
Everything about it was unnerving, from the self-assured way it was positioned to the fact that my car had been locked.
Locked. I unlocked it. Just like my home.
Someone had unlocked and locked my front door and unlocked and locked my car.
This felt worse than the break-in, somehow. The break-in was at least a violation I could quantify. This was psychological warfare.
I didn’t want to open it. I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t want to add whatever it contained to my already-overflowing mental file of worst case scenarios. So I quickly got out and, for some reason, after slamming the car door, locked it and went back inside.
On the way in, I stopped at the security desk, where Kenny was methodically demolishing a family-size bag of Cheese Puffs and watching some kind of martial arts fail compilation.
“Hey Kenny,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.
“Can you pull the footage from the last twelve hours for the garage?”
He didn’t look up from his screen. “Problems with Breakroom Dave again? The Audi blocking you in?”
“No, not this time,” I said. I didn’t want to get into it. Explaining the situation would force me to say it out loud, which would make it real, and I wasn’t ready for that.
He paused his video, orange dust on his fingers. “Is this about the break-in from last night?”
I hesitated. “Maybe, I just need to check something.”
He nodded and snatched a wet wipe, then cleaned off his fingers. “Let’s see what we got.”
After several seconds of typing, his brow furrowed. “That’s weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“There’s an issue with it,” he said, his voice was lower than usual.
“An issue?” I repeated. “What kind of issue?”
“There’s a fifteen-minute gap where the garage footage is blank from four a.m. to four fifteen. None of the cameras were recording. I don’t know if it’s a glitch or...” He continued typing. “Or someone wiped it.”
I blinked as my stomach dropped. “Wiped it?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yeah, if they did, they knew what they were doing. Never seen anything like it.” He paused, then looked up. “I’m gonna call the police, they said to report anything suspicious. Do you want to stick around to tell them why you asked me for it?”
“No,” I shot back, perhaps too quickly. “Just send me whatever you can find if you can retrieve it.”
It was obvious he didn’t like my response, but I turned and headed back to my car before he could say anything.
I knew I should stay and tell both Kenny and the police about the note.
I would bring it to the station tomorrow, or better yet, this evening.
If I reported it now, I’d miss Carly’s birthday party.
I wasn’t going to let whoever this asshole was do that.
My hands started shaking again, and this time I couldn’t make them stop.
I forced myself to start the Tesla and pull out of the garage, feeling both exposed and invisible as I made my way onto the street.
The city was gearing up for the weekend with cyclists weaving through traffic, people in athleisure walking dogs the size of small horses and the usual parade of food trucks and electric scooters.
Normalcy, everywhere I looked. I tried to let it wash over me, to pretend for just a second that everything was fine and I was late for a birthday party because I’d lost track of time, not because someone was actively hunting me.
On the drive to my grandparents’ or rather Bailey’s house, now that she’d moved into it with Cole, the walls felt like they were closing in.
It passed in a blur. I must have stopped at red lights, and navigated the winding streets and lane changes, but all I could think about was the note, radiating menace like a miniature nuclear device.
My phone chimed periodically with messages from my sisters: ETA? What are you wearing? Can I borrow your Jimmy Choos? I replied to none of them, but reading them made my chest ache. They had no idea. No one did and no one would.
I’d always been a handle-your-shit-on-your-own kind of person.
It wasn’t pride, exactly, or even some pathological urge to tough it out—more of a default setting, like the blinking cursor when you open Word.
It was just there, always had been always would be no matter what version.
But even I had to admit, this was a lot to deal with on my own.
The break-ins. The notes. The creeping sense that someone was lurking just out of frame, waiting with the patience of a psychological thriller villain in act one.
And yes, I knew all the advice about reaching out, not letting yourself stew in anxiety, but the one time I’d tried therapy, I spent fifty minutes explaining my family’s emotional division protocol, and the therapist spent the last ten trying to convince me it was okay to not be “the responsible one” all the time.
I didn’t want to burden Bailey or Birdie, they had their own shit, and besides, the more I said this aloud, the more it felt real. I wanted plausible deniability, some mental loophole where I could convince myself that everything was fine if I just didn’t name it. Like Voldemort. Or black mold.
But there was a part of me, a very small voice, that wished I had someone I could talk to. Someone who’d listen and not try to fix it or me, someone who’d just sit there and absorb my freak-out and be completely unbothered by it.
For the first time in a long time, I gave myself permission to miss Adam.
It was strange how his name felt like a hug even now. It’d been years, literal decades, since we’d spoken. Sure, the last time we saw each other was…bad. But before that, he was my best friend. More than a best friend, though I didn’t have the language for it at the time.
Adam had been my only real confidant, the only person who noticed when things got bad with my sisters and grandparents, and the only one who could make me laugh when my world was coming apart at the seams. I spent years trying to rationalize why a six-year-old boy would care about the four-year-old girl he saw sobbing on a porch, but he did.
And he continued to care until the day he ran out of that pool house three days before his eighteenth birthday.
He cared in a way that was relentless and illogical and, sometimes, inconvenient.
He used to come over after school and help me get the girls to do their homework.
He’d invent elaborate scavenger hunts that, in hindsight, were thinly disguised schemes to keep them occupied while I did my own assignments.
Sometimes, when the twins were fighting, he’d stage a fake wrestling match to distract them.
He was a terrible actor, but the commitment was flawless.
He took every punch and every shriek with the patience of a saint.
It was the nights that were the worst. The girls would go to bed, and I’d sit up in my bed, knees to my chest, listening for the sounds of my grandpa’s TV and the distant hum of downtown.
Some nights I’d get so down I’d start having what I called the ‘black cloud days,’ where it felt like I was breathing through a pillow and nothing was ever going to get better.
Somehow, Adam always knew. I still have no idea how he figured it out, but those were the nights he’d crawl through my window, holding an ice cream sandwich, and he’d just sit there on the foot of my bed until I started to thaw out.
If it had been anyone else, I would have found it mortifying.
But with him, it was the only time I didn’t feel like a burden.
For twelve years he was my rock. My everything. Then we kissed, he nearly gives me an orgasm, doesn’t speak to me for three days, leaves town, never speaks to me again.
I always thought I’d hear from him. Especially when my grandparents passed away.
I waited. Nothing. And when his dad died of a heart attack, I didn’t reach out.
Not because I was angry, but because I didn’t know how to say, “I missed you so much it physically hurt.” Or, “You were the only part of my childhood that didn’t suck.
” Or, “You broke my heart, and you didn’t even notice. ”
Now, as I pulled up to my grandparents’ house for Carly’s party and saw Adam’s childhood home next door, still empty after his dad’s passing, the paint on the porch peeling and the lawn an overgrown mess, I felt a weird kind of ache.
The kind that made me want to walk over and ring the doorbell, just to see if maybe, by some freak of quantum probability, he’d be standing there with an ice cream sandwich and a dumb joke that would make everything okay.
But there was no Adam. No one standing in the doorway. No movement in the shadows, just the tired outline of a house that looked as lonely as I felt.
“Hey! What are you doing? I’ve been texting you!” Bailey called out from the front door.
I glanced down at the note. Whatever it said, it would wait until after the party. The party that was taking place next door to the childhood home of the only man I’d ever loved, whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years.
Today was going to be fun.