My phone stamped the date and time on every one of those photos automatically, the way phones do. I did not think much about it at the time. I just did it, saved them to a folder, and forgot about them.
Then I unpacked, and I made that duplex my home.
I lived there two years. I was not a partier. I did not have loud friends over. I was a woman in her early thirties who worked, went to the gym, called her mother on Sundays, and kept a clean house because a clean house is the only thing that felt like mine in a town where I still did not know many people. I painted nothing. I hung a few pictures with the small removable strips that do not leave marks. I was, if I am honest, the ideal tenant. I paid rent on the first, every single month, two years running, never once late.
I dealt with Mr. Vance maybe four times in those two years, and every time there was something in the way he talked to me that I did not like and could not quite name.
The clearest one was in the second winter. The furnace went out on a Tuesday when it was single digits outside, and I called him, and it took him two days to send anyone, and when the repairman finally came he told me the furnace was ancient and should have been replaced years ago. When I called Mr. Vance to follow up, to ask, politely, whether the furnace was going to be repaired properly or just patched, he sighed at me on the phone like I was a child asking for a pony.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “you girls come and go. I am not putting a new furnace in for somebody who is going to be gone by summer. Put on a sweater.”
You girls come and go. I remember standing in my kitchen with the phone against my ear and my breath almost visible in my own living room, and feeling something cold settle in me that had nothing to do with the furnace. It was the way he said it. Like I was not a person paying him twelve hundred dollars a month. Like I was a category. A young woman who would be gone by summer, so why would he bother.
I did not fight it then. I put on a sweater, like he said. I bought a space heater. I was tired, and I did not know I had any power, and I told myself it was not worth it.
That is the trap. That is exactly the trap he sets. He wears you down small so that when the big one comes, you have already learned to swallow it.
The big one came when I gave notice.
