Chapter 5
Trent Holloway spent the morning proving me right about the wrestling mat, and by ten he’d added a set of resistance bands and a kettlebell to the tally, hauling all of it out to a rented box truck with the fluid, unbothered ease of a man who had never once thrown his back out lifting anything heavier than a coffee mug.
I caught him mid-swing with it in the driveway, both hands, full extension, the kind of movement no claims adjuster alive could wave off as consistent with a herniated disc.
Eleven minutes of clean footage across three separate loads, timestamped, backed up twice.
I wrote the preliminary notes sitting in the van with the engine off, the kind of report that writes itself because the evidence does the arguing for you, and by eleven fifteen the file was in a state I’d have been comfortable handing to Harland Mutual’s attorneys without another day of work, something solid enough to stand behind if Trent tried to fight the denial.
That should have been the end of it for the day. It wasn’t, and I’d stopped pretending to myself that the reason was Trent Holloway.
I’d parked closer to Josie’s building than the case required, an angle that gave me a partial line into her bedroom window through a gap where the blinds didn’t quite meet, not because I needed it for anything, but because I’d learned over the last several days that I preferred knowing what her mornings looked like to not knowing.
She kept the window cracked, for air or habit or some reason of her own, and from this angle the frame exposed a detail outside observation entirely, one I caught because I used to do repair work summers in high school and never fully lost the habit of clocking a bad install.
The latch didn’t seat. I watched her push the window shut from the inside, the same motion she probably made every night without thinking about it, and the little metal tongue slid past the strike plate instead of catching it, leaving maybe a quarter inch of daylight between frame and sash that no lock was actually accounting for.
She didn’t seem to notice. Most people don’t, until the night the latch matters.
That fact held me longer than it should have.
A quarter inch of unlatched window on a second-floor unit, facing the street, visible from the sidewalk to anyone who bothered to look up, was a real gap in a building where the front door lock was decent and the rest of the security was mostly theater.
It bothered me in the specific, itchy way that things bother me when I know the fix and can’t apply it.
I told myself that was a professional concern.
I let myself believe that for almost a full minute before admitting it wasn’t, not entirely, and that the truth sat closer to the plain fact that I did not want anyone else finding that gap before I did.
I’d already watched her retrieve a spare key from the coded box under the east stairwell two days earlier, handing it off to a tall woman with bright earrings who’d shown up in a hurry and left the same way, someone Josie clearly knew well enough to trust with a key code.
Josie had punched the four digits into the little gray box without looking at her own fingers, the way you do a thing you’ve done a hundred times, and I’d logged the sequence without deciding what I’d do with it, the same way I logged everything, filing it under information that existed now whether I wanted it to or not.
She left a little after one, moving at her usual speed, keys already out before she hit the bottom of the stairs.
I watched her go through the pedestrian gate, watched her cross the lot, and didn’t move until I saw her car itself pull out onto Rover and turn toward the part of town where she worked, the same route at close to the same time I’d logged three days running.
I gave it another four minutes after that, watching the courtyard, the walkway, the windows of the units that faced hers, running the standard job math.
Nobody around. No maintenance truck scheduled that I’d seen.
A window that wouldn’t latch, on a unit that faced the open street, belonging to a woman who knew perfectly well someone had been watching her, who’d made that plain enough with a sign taped to her own window days ago, but who had no way of knowing that the man she’d been watching for was about to let himself into her home in the next eleven minutes.
I walked to the east stairwell, punched the four digits I had no legal right to know, and took the spare key out of the box like I had every reason to be holding it.
I let myself in through her front door. I want the record, even the one only I keep, to say I knew exactly what that was.
It was breaking and entering with a key instead of a tool, which changes nothing about the law and changes less than I wanted it to about what kind of man I was choosing to be for the next eleven minutes.
The apartment smelled like coffee and something citrus, candle or lotion, I couldn’t have said which and didn’t try to find out.
I kept my eyes disciplined the way I’d trained myself to keep them on a hundred jobs that weren’t mine to enjoy, moving straight through the living room without letting myself catalog it, past a hallway with two closed doors I didn’t open, into the bedroom, where the only thing I let myself look at was the window.
The latch had worn a groove into itself, the kind of thing that happens over years, metal fatigue nobody notices until the exact night it matters.
I had a replacement strike plate and two longer screws in the van, standard hardware, the kind any competent handyman would carry, and it took me under four minutes to swap the plate, drive the new screws through solid wood instead of the stripped-out holes the old ones had been riding on, and test the latch twice until it caught clean both times with the clean, satisfying resistance of a job done right.
I wiped the frame down afterward with a cloth from my back pocket, more habit than necessity, the kind of thing you do on instinct after enough years of not wanting your fingerprints anywhere they didn’t belong.
I did not open a drawer. I did not touch the nightstand, the closet, or the phone charging on a small round table by the bed. I did what I came to do and made myself leave before the room became one more thing I took without permission.
I locked the door behind me on my way out, returned the key to the box, and closed it with the same four digits, and by the time I was back in the van my hands had gone through the motions of a job well executed, latch fixed, entry point secured, evidence untouched, and none of that changed the fact that I had let myself into a woman’s home without her knowledge for a repair she hadn’t asked me to make.
I told myself, sitting there with the engine still off, that a broken latch on an exposed window was a real risk and that fixing it made her safer regardless of the method.
That argument held up exactly as long as it took me to notice how easily I’d found it, how naturally it had arrived, already fully formed.
I’d built better justifications than that for other people’s worse decisions, back when it was my job to make a bad claim look clean.
I recognized the shape of it now from the inside, and recognizing it didn’t stop me from having used it.
I was still sitting with that thought, turning the key over once between my fingers before I dropped it in the console, when Josie’s car turned onto Rover Street forty minutes earlier than any pattern I’d logged for her should have allowed, and pulled into her spot like she had somewhere to be that wasn’t where I’d left her an hour ago.