Chapter Three #2
From there, the prints continued to the bookshelf. My grandmother’s photo had been turned over again, the glass pressed against the wood, her smile hidden. Nothing else on the shelf had been touched. Just the photo. Turned over, exactly as it had been the first time.
I didn’t step forward. I stood in the doorway with my bag still hanging from my shoulder and followed the trail with my eyes. Back and forth. Living room to hallway, hallway to living room. Just the bedroom down the hall, the bathroom beside it.
I set my bag down and walked to the back door.
The deadbolt was engaged, same as I’d left it.
No scratches around the keyhole, no scuffed brass, nothing to suggest force or even effort -- which was somehow worse than finding marks would have been.
Whoever this was didn’t need to leave evidence to get in.
The hook latch was still hanging loose, though. I always caught it after I locked the deadbolt -- a habit, a second layer I didn’t fully trust the first to handle alone -- and today it swung free against the frame, exactly the way it would if I’d forgotten it, except I hadn’t. I never forgot it.
Had someone managed to pick the lock? Or had they disabled it some other way, then walked in, tracked mud across my floor, sat on my couch, turned my grandmother’s photo face down, and let themselves back out through a door they’d locked behind them like a courtesy.
Everything exactly where it should be except for the pillow on the floor and the photo on the shelf and the mud on my hardwood.
I pulled out my phone and called Roulette. He picked up on the second ring.
“Someone was in my house again,” I said. My voice came out hollow. Empty. Facts instead of feeling, because the feeling was too big for words.
A pause. I could hear the soft rumble of an engine in the background, then it cut out.
“Are you still inside?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Don’t touch anything. I’m coming.”
He hung up. I stood in the middle of the living room with my arms wrapped around myself and looked at the boot prints.
They were large. Men’s boots. The tread pattern was aggressive -- deep grooves in a zigzag pattern, work boots or hiking shoes, not the smooth sole of a sneaker.
Something meant for traction, for leaving a mark.
Nine minutes later, I heard the bike. The engine died at the curb, and then boots on the gravel, fast and purposeful. I unlocked the front door before he knocked. He came through it already scanning -- the prints, the pillow, the face down photo, me with my arms crossed over my chest.
He didn’t say anything. Just moved past me toward the back hallway, checking each room as I had the first time, but with sharper attention.
He pushed the bedroom door open with his fingertips and stepped inside.
I heard the closet door slide open, the soft rustle of clothes being shifted.
The bathroom light flicked on, then off.
He came back down the hall and checked the kitchen, crouching at the back door to look the lock over -- no marks, no forced anything, same as I’d found it -- and I watched his jaw tighten the same way mine had that morning, staring at the clean cuts in my tires.
I stayed where I was. Watching him navigating the space with the efficiency of a man who’d done this before. For someone else. In another house. The thought should have been comforting. It wasn’t.
He came back to the living room and stopped in front of me. His expression hadn’t changed. Same calm restraint. But the skin around his eyes had tightened.
“You can’t stay here,” he said.
I opened my mouth. The arguments lined up automatically -- I have a deadbolt, I can call the police, I’m not letting some stranger run me out of my own house -- but he cut through them before I could speak.
“It’s not a question.”
A long beat passed between us. I looked down at the boot prints on my floor.
The mud was drying at the edges, turning pale and cracked, but the center of each print was still dark, still damp enough to have been made recently.
A couple of hours ago, maybe. While I was serving coffee and clearing plates and pretending the world was still the shape it had been yesterday.
I looked at the bookshelf. At the overturned photo. My grandmother’s face pressed against the wood, invisible, like whoever had been here wanted to make sure she couldn’t see what they were doing.
My jaw worked. I could feel the heat behind my eyes. I pushed it down, hard, until it settled somewhere behind my breastbone and stayed there.
I crossed to the shelf and picked up the photo. The glass was cool under my fingers. I held the frame against my ribs, her face turned toward my body where no one could reach it.
“I need to pack a bag,” I said.
Roulette dipped his chin and moved to the door.
He stood there with his back to the room, giving me the privacy of the hallway, and waited while I gathered clothes from the bedroom and my toothbrush from the bathroom and the paperback I’d been reading from the nightstand.
I set the frame in on top of my folded clothes, not bothering to zip the bag all the way -- the photo stuck up at an angle, glass catching the hallway light -- and slung it over my shoulder anyway.
He held the front door open. I stepped through it into the darkness, and he closed it behind us, testing the lock twice the same as I always did. He walked me to my car and waited while I threw the bag onto the passenger seat, then swung a leg over his bike and waited for me to follow him.
The porch light stayed on. The boot prints stayed on the floor. The house sat behind us, hushed and violated, and I didn’t look back.