The House Sitter

Chapter 11 — The Watchers

Maya stood frozen in the doorway of the west-wing suite with her lockpick set still clutched in one hand and her heart hammering against her ribs like it wanted out.

The bed was unmade. A coffee mug steamed on the nightstand, the dark surface of the liquid still trembling faintly, as if it had been set down seconds ago. A paperback novel lay facedown on the pillow, its spine cracked. On the dresser, a silver-backed hairbrush sat beside a small crystal dish of bobby pins, and a woman’s cardigan hung over the back of the armchair, one sleeve trailing toward the floor.

Someone lived here. Someone had been living here the entire time.

Maya’s mind raced backward through three weeks of empty rooms and echoing hallways, three weeks of talking to herself while she watered plants that never seemed to need it, three weeks of carefully locking doors at night in a house that was supposed to be hers alone. The “renovation” wing. The rooms she’d been told never to enter.

The toothbrush in the bathroom had been wet.

Behind her, a floorboard creaked.

She spun around, the lockpicks scattering across the hardwood with a bright metallic clatter, and there — in the doorway, in a soft gray cardigan with reading glasses pushed up into his thinning hair, holding a mug of his own — stood Richard Ashford.

He did not look surprised. He did not look angry. He looked, impossibly, like a man who had been expecting her.

“Hello, Maya,” he said.

For a moment neither of them moved. Dust drifted in the shaft of light from the hallway. Maya became aware of absurd, useless details: the monogram on his mug, the faint smell of pipe tobacco on his cardigan, the wedding band glinting on his left hand. This was a man standing in his own home on an ordinary evening — and she was the intruder, even though she was the one who had been invited.

Maya’s mouth opened. No sound came out. Her brain offered up several facts in rapid succession, none of them useful: Richard Ashford was supposed to be in Europe. Richard Ashford had waved at her from the back of a black car three weeks ago, his wife beside him, both of them smiling like people with absolutely nowhere to be. Richard Ashford was seven thousand miles away.

“You’re—” she managed. “You’re supposed to be in—”

“Europe,” Richard finished for her, and took a calm sip of his coffee. “Yes. I know.”

The hallway tilted. Maya grabbed the doorframe to steady herself. “What—what are you doing here? When did you get back? Why didn’t you—”

“We never left.” His voice was even, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. “There was no trip, Maya. The car, the suitcases, the farewell at the door — all of it was staged. We’ve been here the whole time. Right here, in the west wing. Three weeks.”

The words landed one by one, each heavier than the last. Maya stared at him, waiting for the punchline, the prank reveal, the hidden camera crew. Then her eyes drifted past him to the hallway wall, to the small black dome camera mounted above the linen closet — one of a dozen she’d noticed on her first day and dismissed as a standard security system.

“You’ve been—” Her throat closed. “You’ve been in the house. This whole time.”

“Yes.”

“Watching me.”

A pause. Then, quietly: “Yes.”

Something cold spread through Maya’s chest and down into her stomach. Three weeks. She thought of the second night, sitting on the living room couch in her pajamas, crying into a bowl of cereal over a tuition bill she couldn’t pay. She thought of the mornings she’d danced around the kitchen in her underwear while the coffee brewed, singing off-key. She thought of the night she’d talked to her mother on speakerphone for an hour, saying things she’d never said in front of anyone.

“You watched all of that,” she whispered.

She thought of the third morning, standing at the kitchen window in Richard’s own robe — she’d borrowed it from the hall closet on a cold morning, feeling like a thief — drinking his coffee, leaving her mug in his sink. She thought of the night she’d gotten drunk on the expensive wine in the cellar, the bottle she’d told herself they would never miss, and cried into a throw pillow about her student loans. She thought of the afternoon she’d stood in front of the hallway mirror practicing her thesis defense, gesturing at no one, mouthing words she’d been too embarrassed to say out loud in front of anyone living.

Someone living had watched all of it.

“We needed to see,” Richard said, and for the first time something cracked in his composure — just a hairline fracture, there and gone.

“See what?” Maya’s voice rose, shrill and unfamiliar. “See what, Richard? I’m calling the police. This is — this is insane, this is a crime, you can’t just—”

“The footsteps.” He cut through her panic with two quiet words. “The nights you woke up at two in the morning, sure someone was outside your door. The humming through the walls that you told yourself was the pipes.”

Maya went still. She had never told anyone about the humming.

“That was Evelyn,” Richard said. “She couldn’t sleep. She’d stand in the west-wing corridor, on the other side of your wall, and—” He stopped, cleared his throat. “She checked on you. Every night. She needed to know you were breathing.”

“That’s not — you don’t get to —” Maya fumbled her phone from her pocket with shaking hands. “I’m calling the police right now.”

“Then call them.” Richard set his mug down on the hallway table with deliberate care. “They’ll come, and we’ll tell them everything, and we’ll deserve whatever happens. But first—” He looked at her then, really looked at her, and the expression on his face stopped her thumb over the screen. It was the look of a man staring at a ghost. “Give us one hour. One hour, and the whole truth. Then, if you still want to call the police, I’ll hand you the phone myself.”

Behind him, at the far end of the corridor, a door opened. Evelyn Ashford stood in a pale robe, her hair loose around her shoulders, her face wet and wrecked. She pressed both hands to her mouth when she saw Maya, like she was holding back a scream.

“Please,” Evelyn whispered. “Please don’t run.”

Maya looked at the phone in her hand. She looked at Richard, calm and ruined in the doorway. She looked at Evelyn, shaking forty feet away like a woman at a graveside.

Every instinct she had screamed at her to run — to get in her car, to drive down out of the Hollywood Hills and never look back. But beneath the terror, something else stirred: a terrible, magnetic curiosity. The kind that gets people killed in movies. The kind she couldn’t fight.

“One hour,” she said.

Richard nodded slowly. “It started twenty years ago,” he said. “With our daughter.”