The drive home usually takes ten minutes. Tonight it feels like an hour — every block stretching, every red light lasting a small eternity while I check the rearview mirror for headlights keeping a consistent distance.
I run every yellow signal without apology.
My apartment is on the third floor of a building in Logan Square that I picked for its good bones, a fire escape I use as a balcony in summer, and a landlord who actually fixes things when you ask — which, in Chicago, is basically a miracle. I park, take the stairs, lock both deadbolts behind me, and stand in my own hallway for a moment just... breathing.
The feeling, I notice, is gone. Whatever was in that parking lot didn’t follow me here.
Or they were here first.
The thought pops up and I shove it right back down.
I go to the bathroom and peel off the scrubs that have absorbed an entire day’s worth of tiny emergencies. I crank the shower as hot as it goes and stand under it until the water starts to cool and my muscles finally wave the white flag.
I towel off and grab the oversized sweatshirt that’s been my unofficial pajama uniform for two years.
It smells different.
Not bad — not like a stranger, not like cologne or chemicals or anything I can flag as wrong. Just... not the way I left it. Cleaner. As though someone folded it and placed it back on the hook with more care than I have ever once applied to that sweatshirt in its entire life.
I press it to my face and breathe in, searching for something I can name, and catch the faintest trace of — cedar? Something dark and woody that doesn’t belong to my laundry detergent or anything I own.
I lower the sweatshirt. I put it on anyway.
It’s when I get to the kitchen that I remember.
I haven’t gone grocery shopping. Haven’t managed it in two weeks. My fridge almost certainly contains one sad container of old pad thai and maybe —maybe— a lime. Delivery at 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday? Not happening. My options have narrowed to eating the lime, going to bed hungry, or?—
I open the refrigerator.
I stand there, staring, for what feels like a small eternity.
It’s full.
Not has-a-few-things-in-it full.Stocked.Organized, even, with produce in the crisper, proteins on the second shelf, dairy in the door. Strawberries, bright red and perfect. A rotisserie chicken. Greek yogurt and the exact brand of oat milk I put in my coffee every morning — the one that only two stores in this neighborhood carry.
And sitting at the back of the second shelf, placed there as though someone knew it was the thing I wanted most: a container of cremini mushrooms.
I blink at the mushrooms.
Cremini mushrooms were on my grocery list. The list in my phone’s notes app. The one I added to two weeks ago when I found a risotto recipe I wanted to try. The list I have never shown to another person, never mentioned out loud, never shared with anyone on this planet.
Someone read my phone.
Someone was inside my apartment.
I take a step back from the fridge.
I scan the apartment — living room, normal. Couch where it belongs, and there’s the throw blanket Ellie gave me two Christmases ago, the stack of medical journals I keep swearing I’ll read. Nothing moved. Fire escape latched. Front door was double-locked when I walked in.
Which means whoever did this has a key. Or doesn’t need one.
Landon,my brain offers. But the idea falls apart before it’s fully formed. Landon Webb — the man who has never once demonstrated awareness that other people have inner lives — figured out my oat milk preference and memorized my grocery list? Landon, whose version of thoughtfulness is remembering a woman’s dress size so he can buy her something she didn’t want? Please. This kind of attention is too detailed, too personal, toospecificfor a man who treats people like chess pieces.
This is someone else.
Someone who has been watching me with a thoroughness that makes Landon’s crude surveillance resemble a child’s game.
My hand drifts toward the phone on the counter. I should call someone. Ellie — except Ellie is unreachable, tangled up in aworld I don’t fully understand.
