The House Sitter

Chapter 10 — The Lock

On the sixteenth day, Maya picked the west-wing lock.

It wasn’t a decision so much as a surrender. She’d spent two weeks telling herself stories — florist schedules, old houses, grief by proximity — and every story had worn thinner than the last, until the only thing left was the door at the end of the upstairs hall and the silence behind it, holding very, very still.

She was an architecture student. She understood old hardware the way other people understood old songs. The west-wing door wore a 1920s mortise lock, brass gone dark with age, a skeleton keyhole like a surprised mouth. A lock that predated paranoia. A lock that trusted the world.

A bobby pin. A paperclip. A YouTube video she’d watched at 2 a.m. with the sound off, lying to herself about why.

Twenty minutes, tongue between her teeth, sweat running down her ribs. The bobby pin bent. The paperclip bent. Her hands shook — they did that now — and she had to start over twice.

Click.

The sound was small and total, like a bone settling into a joint.

The door swung inward on silent hinges — recently oiled hinges, some distant professional part of her noted — and afternoon light fell across the threshold in a clean bar, and Maya’s stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Because this was not a storage room. This was not a shrine.

Someone lived here.

The sitting room opened in front of her, plantation shutters striping the afternoon sun across a rug worn soft with use. An armchair angled toward the windows, a folded throw over its arm, the fabric rubbed pale where hands rested. On the side table: today’s newspaper — she checked the date twice, her eyes snagging on it the way they’d snagged on the warm vent — folded open to the crossword, half-finished in small, careful pencil. Reading glasses folded on top, one temple arm loose.

A coffee cup. She touched it without thinking.

Warm.

Her hand jerked back like she’d been burned, though it was only warm, only coffee-warm, an hour old, maybe less. Someone had been sitting in that chair, working that crossword, drinking that coffee, an hour ago. While she was downstairs answering her advisor’s email. While she was alive and oblivious twenty feet away.

The bedroom was beyond, through a wide cased opening. The bed was made with hospital corners, the kind of corners that took practice, pillows plumped and centered with geometric precision. On the nightstand: a bud vase with fresh white orchids, flawless, not a brown edge — and a framed photograph.

Maya picked it up with hands that had stopped shaking, which frightened her more than the shaking had.

The little girl from the library. Dark curls, gap-toothed grin, white dress, jacaranda tree. Richard’s hand on her shoulder. Evelyn’s cheek on her ruined head — except here the head wasn’t ruined. Here the face was intact, laughing, thrown back at the sky, and the joy of it hit Maya like a physical thing.

Her chest seized. The fist around the sternum, the breath snagging halfway down. She set the photograph down very carefully, exactly as it had been, angled toward the bed like someone liked to look at it last thing.

The bathroom: a damp towel on the rack, still holding the shape of shoulders. A ghost of steam on the mirror, fading even as she watched — recent, so recent. A pill organizer on the counter, the compartments labeled S M T W T F S in careful marker, today’s flipped open and empty.

The television, in the corner of the sitting room, was paused on a cooking show. The mute icon glowed in the corner of the screen. Someone had been watching, had paused it — for what? A sound in the hall? Her key in the front door? — and had simply… gone. Stepped out of the frame of their own life like a ghost.

There was a closet, and she opened it before she could decide not to, her heart loud in her ears. Inside: clothes on hangers, zipped into garment bags, anonymous as body bags. She didn’t unzip them. She didn’t want to know what size they were, whose shape they held. On the bookshelf beside the television, the books were worn soft at the spines — the kind of worn that took years, not weeks. A novel lay face-down on the arm of the chair, splayed open at page 214, a grocery receipt marking nothing. Whoever lived here read the way Maya’s grandmother had read: completely, constantly, like breathing.

She took out her phone and photographed the newspaper’s date line — furtive, stupid, necessary — proof, in case she woke tomorrow and decided she’d imagined all of it. The date stared back at her, black and indifferent.

Today.

Maya stood in the middle of the sitting room with her heart hammering and tried to think.

The Ashfords were in Europe. That was the foundation everything else was built on — the agency, the schedule, the texts. So who lived here? A squatter, bold beyond belief, doing crosswords and drinking coffee in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills? Someone from the agency, running a second business out of the locked wing? Her mind threw up explanations and knocked them down as fast, each one more absurd than the last, and underneath all of them ran a single cold current: someone had been here today. An hour ago. Maybe less.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she nearly dropped it.

Evelyn. A photo: the two of them at a sunlit café, Evelyn laughing with her head thrown back, Richard caught mid-sip, a street with flower boxes blurred behind them.

Paris is lovely! Miss the house terribly. Everything all right? xo

Maya stared at the photo. Stared at the warm coffee cup on the side table. Stared at the photo again, at Evelyn’s laughing face, at the timestamp glowing in the corner.

Today.

And from the far end of the suite, behind a closed door she hadn’t tried yet —

The unmistakable sound of a toilet flushing.