Chapter 3

I vacuumed my closet.

That was my first response to finding evidence that someone had been standing in there, watching me sleep. Not calling the police. Not checking my locks. Not packing a bag and getting the hell out. I got my vacuum cleaner and I erased the footprints like they were a mistake on a whiteboard.

I don't know why. Self-preservation, maybe. If the evidence was gone, then it hadn't really happened. If the dust was smooth again, I could tell myself I'd imagined it. Pareidolia. That thing where your brain sees patterns that aren't there. Faces in clouds. Jesus on toast. Footprints in random dust accumulation.

It took about thirty seconds to destroy any proof. The vacuum hummed and the dust disappeared and I stood there in my closet surrounded by clothes I never wore anymore, breathing hard like I'd just sprinted a mile.

Then I checked every inch of my apartment.

Every window. Every lock. The front door, the back door, the door to the tiny balcony I never used. I checked behind the shower curtain, under the bed, inside the coat closet by the entrance. I checked cabinets that were too small to hide a person, just to be thorough. Just to feel like I was doing something.

Everything was locked. Everything was secure. No signs of forced entry, no scratches on the doorframes, no windows left ajar.

So either someone had a key.

Or there was another way in that I didn't understand.

Or I was losing my mind.

I kept coming back to that third option as the morning wore on. Maybe it was the most comforting one. Mental illness has treatments. Medications. Therapy. A name and a framework and a path forward. Whatever was happening to me at 3:33 had none of those things.

But I couldn't quite make myself believe it. The footprints had been real. The dust had been displaced in a specific pattern, two feet, facing my bed. I'd seen it clearly in the morning light before I panicked and vacuumed it away.

And the message. Don't trust her.

I spent hours trying to figure out who "her" could be.

My mom lived three states away and we talked maybe once a month. My sister and I had drifted apart after she got married; I'd seen her twice in the past year. I had female coworkers, sure, but none I was close to. None who would have any reason to be in my apartment, standing in my closet, watching me sleep.

I thought about my ex, Sarah. We'd been together for two years before it fell apart. She was the one who ended it, said I was too distant, too in my own head, too somewhere else even when I was sitting right next to her. She wasn't wrong. But she'd moved to Seattle eight months ago for a job. Started dating someone new, according to the Instagram I definitely didn't check more often than I should.

Eight months ago.

The same time the waking started.

I sat with that coincidence for a while, trying to make it mean something. Sarah leaves. The phenomenon begins. Some kind of psychological break triggered by abandonment? The other room as a fantasy of the life I could have had if I'd been better, more present, more worth staying for?

But that didn't explain the message. Sarah had no reason to hurt me. We'd ended things sadly but not badly. No screaming fights, no burning resentments, just two people who'd slowly realized they were better off apart.

And it definitely didn't explain the footprints.

By mid-afternoon I'd cycled through every woman I could think of. Distant relatives. Old friends I'd lost touch with. The barista at the coffee shop near my office who always remembered my order. The neighbor down the hall who I sometimes nodded to when we passed in the corridor.

None of it made sense. None of them fit.

I started to wonder if "her" was even someone I knew. Maybe it was someone I hadn't met yet. A warning about a future encounter rather than a current threat. Or maybe "her" didn't refer to a human at all. Maybe it was something else, something I didn't have a framework for, something that only looked like a woman from certain angles.

That thought made me want to vacuum something else just to have something to do with my hands.

Around 4 PM, I made myself leave the apartment. I couldn't sit there anymore, checking the closet every fifteen minutes, jumping at every creak from the old building settling around me. I needed air. Movement. The presence of other humans to remind me that the world was still functioning normally even if my corner of it had gone sideways.

I walked to the park three blocks away. It was a gray day, overcast and threatening rain, and the park was mostly empty. A few joggers. A woman walking a dog. An old man feeding pigeons from a bench.

I sat on a different bench and watched the pigeons for a while. Tried to empty my brain. Let the ordinary sounds of the city wash over me. Traffic in the distance. Kids yelling somewhere. A plane overhead, leaving a white scar across the gray sky.

It didn't work. I couldn't stop thinking about the closet. The footprints. The way the other me had pointed over my shoulder with that look of absolute terror.

I wondered if they'd seen something I hadn't. If the seventeen seconds gave them a view into my room that I didn't have access to. Maybe they could see things that existed on my side but not on theirs. Things that hid when the window closed.

The thought made my skin crawl.

I was still sitting there when I noticed the woman.

She was standing near the park entrance, maybe fifty feet away. Not doing anything. Not walking a dog or jogging or feeding birds. Just standing there, hands in her coat pockets, looking in my direction.

I couldn't see her face clearly from that distance. She was wearing a gray coat that blended with the overcast sky, dark hair pulled back from her face. Average height, average build. Nothing distinctive about her at all.

But she was looking at me. I was sure of it.

I stared back, waiting for her to do something. Approach me. Walk away. Pull out a phone. Anything that would make her presence make sense.

She didn't move.

After a minute or so, I stood up. Started walking toward her. I don't know what I was planning to do. Ask her what she wanted. Demand to know if she'd been in my apartment. Confirm that she was even real, that my brain wasn't manufacturing threats out of random strangers.

I got maybe twenty feet closer before she turned and walked away.

Not running. Not hurrying. Just a calm, unhurried exit, like she'd gotten what she came for and had somewhere else to be.

By the time I reached the park entrance, she was gone. The sidewalk stretched in both directions, dotted with pedestrians, and none of them were her.

I stood there for a long time, heart pounding, scanning faces that didn't match.

She could have been no one. A random woman who happened to be standing near the entrance. Maybe she wasn't even looking at me. Maybe she was looking at something past me, lost in thought, and my paranoid brain connected dots that didn't exist.

But I didn't believe it. Something about the way she'd stood there. The stillness of it. The patience. Like she was waiting.

I went home. Checked the locks again. Checked the closet again. Stood in the middle of my living room as the sun went down and the apartment filled up with shadows.

Don't trust her.

Don't trust her.

I didn't know who she was. But I was starting to think she knew exactly who I was.

That night, I prepared more signs. More questions. WHO IS SHE. HOW DO I STOP THIS. WHAT HAPPENED TO ME. I lined them up on my nightstand, ready to grab in sequence.

I set my phone to record video, pointed at my bed. I knew it wouldn't capture the other room. The test before had proven that. But maybe it would catch something else. Movement in the darkness. A shape in the closet. Evidence that I wasn't crazy, that something was actually happening beyond what my eyes could see.

I didn't expect to sleep. But at some point, exhaustion won.

I woke at 3:33.

The room shifted. Blue curtains. The plant. The wooden headboard.

I grabbed my flashlight, clicked it on, raised my first sign. WHO IS SHE.

The other me was waiting for me. Standing again, but closer this time. So close I could see the stubble on their jaw, the bloodshot veins in their eyes. They looked worse than before. Thinner. More ragged. Like they hadn't slept in days even though I watched them sleep peacefully for eight months.

They were holding another sign. Already prepared.

But they didn't raise it right away.

Instead, they looked at my sign. Read my question. And something in their face crumbled. A grief so raw it hurt to look at, like I was seeing someone receive the worst news of their life.

They raised their sign.

Three words again. Same block letters. Same thick marker.

SHE'S BEHIND YOU

I didn't freeze this time.

I spun around.

My flashlight beam cut through the darkness of my room, sweeping across gray curtains and cheap furniture and the half-open closet door.

And in that beam, for just a fraction of a second before the seventeen seconds ended, I saw her.

Standing in the corner. So still she could have been a shadow. A gray coat that blended with the walls. Dark hair pulled back from a face I couldn't quite focus on, like trying to read a sign from a moving car.

She was smiling.

Then my room snapped back to normal and she was gone.

I lunged for the corner anyway. My hands hit the wall, solid and cold and empty. Nothing there. No one there. Just paint and plaster and the faint smell of dust.

But she had been there. I'd seen her. Not just in my paranoid imagination, not just in the other me's warning.

She'd been standing in my room. Watching me.

Smiling.

I tore through my apartment. Turned on every light. Checked every space a person could hide. Found nothing, no one, no evidence that anyone had been there at all.

But when I finally stopped moving, when I finally stood still in my blazingly lit living room with my chest heaving and my hands shaking, I noticed something I'd missed before.

My notebook. The one I kept on my nightstand to record details from the seventeen seconds.

It was open to a page I hadn't written on.

There, in handwriting that wasn't mine, was a single sentence:

"You shouldn't have looked."