The House Across the Street

Chapter 2 — The Lens

On Wednesday it rained, and Rachel told herself the weather would keep everyone inside, including him. She spent the morning doing laundry and folding onesies at the dining table, and by two o’clock the rain had stopped and the sun had come out weak and watery, and Sophie was awake and restless, so Rachel loaded the baby into the car seat and drove to the grocery store for the first time in a week.

She came home with two paper bags of groceries and a sleeping baby and the fragile, exhausted pride of a woman who had completed a normal human task. She parked in the driveway, slung her purse over her shoulder, balanced Sophie’s carrier on one arm and the groceries on the other, and walked up the front steps.

That was when she heard the shutter click.

It was a soft sound — a camera shutter, unmistakable, mechanical — and it came from across the street. Rachel froze on her own porch with the key in the lock, and she turned her head slowly, the way you turn toward something you already know is there, and she saw him.

The man from the porch was standing now, at the edge of his yard, and he was holding a camera with a long lens pointed directly at her. At her front door. At her, holding her baby daughter.

The lens glinted in the afternoon sun. The shutter clicked again.

Rachel’s hands went numb. The grocery bags slid from her arm and hit the porch boards with a dull thud — a jar of marinara sauce cracked, red spreading across the brown paper like something worse than marinara. She stood there holding Sophie’s carrier, staring at the man, and the man lowered his camera very slowly and looked straight at her, the way he had looked at her from the porch yesterday, and he nodded.

Once. A small, deliberate nod.

Then he turned and walked back up his own porch steps and sat down in his wicker chair and picked up his mug, as if nothing had happened.

Rachel got the door open with shaking hands. She got Sophie inside — the baby had woken up and was crying now, startled by the jolt — and she locked the deadbolt with a click that sounded absurdly loud in the silent house. She set the carrier on the rug and sank to the floor beside it, one hand on the baby’s chest, the other pressed flat against the wood of the door, and she breathed.

It took her twenty minutes to go back out for the groceries. She opened the door six inches, scanned the street — Mercer’s porch empty, thank God — and darted out like a soldier crossing open ground. The paper bags had split. The marinara jar had cracked cleanly in half, and red sauce bled across the porch boards in a widening stain that looked, absurdly, like a crime scene. She mopped it with paper towels, her hands shaking, and the stain stayed — a pink ghost soaked into the wood grain. Every time she came home after that, she would see it, and her stomach would drop all over again.

Inside, Sophie was screaming — the fall, the jolt, the strange terror in her mother’s arms. Rachel nursed her on the couch with the blinds drawn, whispering nonsense, and when the baby finally slept, Rachel did something she hadn’t done since she was a teenager with a diary: she opened the notes app on her phone and typed, with her thumb, *Man across street photographed me + Sophie. 10/8, ~4pm. He nodded at me.*

She stared at the note. It looked paranoid. It looked like evidence. She wasn’t sure which scared her more.

Eric called at six from the hotel bar in Chicago — she could hear ice clinking, men’s laughter. She told him about the grocery run, about Sophie’s nap, about the stain on the porch (she blamed the bags, the wind, her own clumsiness). She did not tell him about the shutter clicks. She told herself she was sparing him worry on a work trip. The truth — the uglier truth — was that she already knew what he’d say, and she couldn’t bear to hear it yet: *You’re tired, Rach. You’re not sleeping.*

She wasn’t sleeping. But she wasn’t blind, either.

“He took a picture of me,” she whispered. “He took a picture of my baby.”

She checked the locks three times that afternoon. She drew every blind in the house, even the ones in rooms she never used, even the ones on the second floor. When Eric called from the airport — Chicago, two nights, software sales conferences stacked like dominoes — she started to tell him and stopped, because she could already hear what he would say. You’re tired, Rach. You’re not sleeping. The world looks different at four in the morning.

But it wasn’t four in the morning. It was four in the afternoon, and a man across the street had photographed her child.

That night, after Sophie’s last feeding, Rachel stood in the dark of the nursery with the baby asleep against her shoulder and looked out through a two-inch gap in the blinds at the house across the street. The porch light was on. The wicker chair was empty. The windows were dark.

She almost looked away. Then the first window lit up — the front parlor, a warm yellow square. Then the next one. Then the next. A slow, deliberate sequence, left to right, like someone walking through the house turning on every light, room by room, announcing: I am here. I am awake.

Rachel counted without meaning to. Six windows. Six lights. In the nursery, Sophie’s breath was warm against her neck, and Rachel’s free hand found her phone in her robe pocket. Before she could talk herself out of it, she raised it to the gap in the blinds and took a photograph — the lit windows, the dark street, the grainy proof that she wasn’t imagining things.

The photo was useless. A smear of light and shadow, meaningless to anyone but her. She deleted it, her face burning, and hated the man across the street for making her into someone who took pictures through blinds at midnight.

She watched until the last light went out — all at once this time, like a held breath released — and the house across the street went dark again, every window black, as if no one had ever been awake at all.

Rachel stepped back into the dark nursery and held her daughter tighter, and she did not sleep at all.

—