I didn't sleep again.
I lay in bed with the lights off and listened to the apartment settle around me the way old buildings do at night, small sounds that had never bothered me before, but that felt different now that I knew someone had been inside while I was home. I had checked the lock three times before getting into bed. I had checked the windows. I had moved the deadbolt and added the chain.
None of it made me feel particularly safe.
The envelope was gone. The photographs and the note, the only physical evidence I had that someone had deliberately fed me this story, were taken cleanly and specifically from my kitchen table while I was twenty feet away in the living room. Whoever had done it was either very confident or very practiced, and neither option was reassuring.
By six AM,
