Chapter 6
I noticed the latch before I noticed anything else, which probably says something about how my brain is wired, because a normal person coming home might have clocked the smell of the place first, or the light, or the general fact of being inside their own apartment again after a long morning.
I clocked hardware. I pushed the bedroom window shut the way I always did, hip against the sill, palm flat on the frame, and it caught on the first try with a small, solid click that had never once happened in the two years I’d lived here.
I stood there with my hand still on the glass, not moving, running that click back through my head like I could rewind it and check it for accuracy.
The old latch had a give to it, half a second of resistance before it seated, worn enough that I’d learned to push and wiggle at the same time without thinking about it, the kind of small daily choreography you stop noticing because your body has already memorized it.
This wasn’t that. This was clean. I crouched down and looked at the screws holding the strike plate, and they were the wrong screws, longer, a slightly different head, bright metal instead of the dull brassy color that had been there since before I moved in.
Someone had replaced the plate. Someone had driven new screws into my window frame with a screwdriver or a drill, and they had done it well enough that the latch worked better than it ever had in the entire time I’d lived in this apartment.
I photographed it before I let myself think about what it meant, three angles, one with my hand in the frame for scale, because that was the part of me that had spent three years building rooms full of hidden mechanisms and knew that evidence you didn’t capture in the moment had a way of becoming a story you told yourself later instead of a fact you could point to.
Then I made myself walk the apartment the way I’d walk a room before opening night, checking every mechanism, assuming nothing worked until I’d tested it myself.
Front door deadbolt, fine, locked the way I’d left it.
Kitchen window, untouched, old latch still loose and familiar under my palm.
Familiar didn’t mean much anymore. It just meant nobody had bothered with that one yet.
I checked the closet, the space under the bed, behind the shower curtain, every place a person could hide or a device could sit unnoticed, running my hand along shelf edges and doorframes and the tops of picture frames, looking for anything that didn’t belong, a lens, a blinking light, a shape too deliberate to be dust. I found nothing.
That should have been a relief. It mostly wasn’t, because nothing didn’t mean nobody had been here.
It meant somebody skilled enough not to leave anything behind had been here, had walked through my apartment, had touched my window, and had left without taking a single thing I could point to and say, there, that’s proof.
I sat down on the edge of my bed and let myself feel it, actually feel it, instead of doing the thing where I turned it into commentary before it landed.
My hands weren’t steady. I watched my own fingers not quite hold still against my knee, distant and clinical about it the way I might have been watching someone else’s hands.
My chest had gone tight without exertion.
Someone had known the four digits to the key box under the stairwell.
Someone had walked up to my front door in broad daylight, let himself in like he had every right to be standing in my hallway, and moved through my home while I was at work fifteen minutes away, close enough to have driven back if I’d forgotten something and come home early, close enough that the only reason I hadn’t found him standing in my bedroom was luck and timing and nothing I had actually controlled.
He could have gone through my drawers. He could have taken photographs of things that weren’t a window latch.
He could have sat on my bed and waited for me, and the only reason I knew he hadn’t was that nothing looked disturbed, which was a fact built entirely on trusting the judgment of the same person who had already proven he didn’t think my consent was a requirement for entering my home.
I made myself sit with that, the whole shape of it, the fact that safe and felt safe were not the same thing and that I had just discovered the exact size of the gap between them.
This wasn’t fear about what he might do next.
This was fear about what he had already done, quietly, competently, while I stood at a register fifteen minutes away making change for a stranger.
I let it sit for a while, longer than I wanted to admit, until my hands settled and the tightness in my chest eased into something I could work with instead of something working me.
I already had his name, his license number, his business address, his face.
I pulled up the file I’d started and added today’s fact: a repaired bedroom-window latch, screws I hadn’t bought, entry sometime between when I left for work and when I got home early on a hunch.
I thought seriously, for the length of one cup of water drunk slowly at my kitchen counter, about calling the police.
A report would exist even if nothing came of it.
The property manager could change the compromised key-box code that afternoon if I pushed hard enough.
Those were real options. I set them down carefully to come back to, because right now I wanted to know why before I wanted anything else, and a police report wasn’t going to tell me that.
I thought about moving and dismissed it almost as fast. I loved this apartment, and I wasn’t giving up my home to a man who hadn’t even had the decency to leave a note.
That last thought sat funny in my head. A note. I didn’t know yet what this was. I only knew it wasn’t only terror, even though my hands had shaken like it was, even though my chest still ached faintly at the edges. Whatever he’d meant by it, I wasn’t going to hand him the meaning for free.
I called Dani and told her everything, the latch, the screws, the sweep, the nothing I’d found and the everything it implied anyway.
“Yellow just became orange.” Something clattered at Dani’s end of the call.
“I am trying very hard not to drive over there and put you in my car myself. Orange means no more private meetings, Josie. That’s the line we set.
I need you to hear me say it before you tell me whatever you’re about to tell me, because I can already hear the pause. ”
“I want to leave him something,” I said. “A test. Not a meeting. I won’t be there.”
“You’ll be there in every way that matters if you invite him back into your apartment,” she said. “That’s not a loophole, that’s the exact thing orange is supposed to stop.”
“I know,” I said, and meant it. “I’m not asking you to sign off. I’m telling you what I’m doing so you can be angry about it with full information instead of finding out later.”
She was quiet for a second. “Fine. I hate this, and I also know you’re going to do it. Tell me the exact window. Check in immediately before and after, and if that faucet gets touched, call me before you go near the apartment. I want the part where I hate this on the record too.”
“On the record,” I said. “Both parts.”
I hung up and sat with the legal pad in front of me, the same block letters Dani had taught me to use for logging everything else this week, no flourish, nothing I’d have to explain later if this went sideways.
THE BATHROOM FAUCET IS LEAKING. SINCE YOU ALREADY KNOW WHERE I KEEP THE SPARE KEY.
I taped it inside the kitchen window glass, not the bedroom, the one that faced the street, positioned exactly where someone sitting at that particular angle, in that particular stretch of curb, would have a clean line to read it without needing binoculars or nerve.
I stood back and checked the sightline myself, made sure the note sat square in the pane and not tilted, made sure the tape wouldn’t peel by evening.
Before I pulled the curtain, I turned toward the bathroom, lifted one hand, and pointed, slow and deliberate, the way you’d point out a stage direction to someone who needed to hit their mark.
Then I smiled, straight at the glass, straight at whoever might be watching from wherever he was parked today, and let the curtain fall closed behind me.