I woke up to the smell of coffee – but I live alone and don’t drink it.
It began with small things. A sock misplaced. My razor slightly wet, even though I hadn’t used it in two days. I dismissed it at first – maybe I was just getting careless, forgetting small routines. That happens, doesn’t it?
But last Thursday, I woke up to the faint scent of coffee in the apartment. The thing is, I don’t even own a coffee maker. I drink tea. I always have. I walked into the kitchen, heart pounding, but everything looked normal. Windows locked. Door bolted. Nothing missing. I even checked the stove, like maybe I’d finally snapped and made coffee in my sleep. Cold burners.
Then yesterday morning, I noticed the living room chair had been shifted slightly – angled more toward the hallway leading to my bedroom. I hadn’t touched that chair all week.
So I decided to test something. I spread flour by the front door and the balcony entrance before I went to bed last night. Just enough to catch a footprint.
This morning?
The front door was untouched. But the flour near the balcony door had a single, clear shoeprint leading inside.
What Do You Even Do With That
I stood there in my socks staring at it for a long time.
It wasn’t a smear. It wasn’t my own print from the night before – I’d been careful, stepped around the flour in a wide arc, went straight to bed. This was a full shoe impression. Maybe a size ten. Maybe eleven. Heel to toe, pointing inward. Toward my apartment. Toward the hallway. Toward where I’d been sleeping.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I just stood there with my phone in my hand and my thumb hovering over the keypad and I thought: who do I even call?
Nothing was stolen. Nothing was broken. There was just a print in some flour and the memory of coffee I couldn’t have made.
The cops, when I finally called them, were polite about it. Officer came out around 9 AM, a guy named Dale, forty-something, the kind of tired that lives in the corners of your eyes. He looked at the print. He looked at the balcony door. He asked if the door had been locked and I said yes, I always lock it, and he asked if maybe I’d had someone over recently and I said no, I live alone, I’ve lived alone for three years.
He wrote something down. He said they’d send someone to check the balcony rail for prints. He said I should make sure my locks were functioning correctly. He said to call if anything else happened.
Then he left.
Three Years in This Apartment
I moved in after my divorce from Gary. Not a dramatic divorce – no affair, no screaming, just two people who’d been quietly wrong for each other finally saying it out loud. We sold the house in Millbrook, split what there was to split, and I found this place. Second floor. Decent neighborhood. A balcony that faces a parking lot, which I always thought was ugly but now I’m realizing I never once worried about it as a security risk because it’s a second-floor balcony facing a parking lot.
I work from home. Freelance copywriting, mostly boring stuff – product descriptions, email campaigns, the kind of writing that pays the rent without requiring much of your soul. I keep odd hours sometimes. I’m up late, I sleep in, I lose track of what day it is.
I’m telling you this because I want you to understand: I know my apartment. I know where I put things. I know which floorboards creak and which cabinet door doesn’t close flush and exactly how my razor looks when I’ve used it versus when I haven’t. I’m not messy. I’m not forgetful. I’m a person who lives alone and pays close attention to her own space because there’s no one else to pay attention to it.
The razor being wet – that was the first thing that actually scared me. Two weeks ago, maybe three. I picked it up and the handle was damp, not dripping, just slightly tacky the way things get when they’ve been touched by wet hands. I hadn’t showered that morning yet. I stood in the bathroom doorway for a second and then I told myself I must have used it the night before and forgotten, which I knew wasn’t true, but it was easier.
The Chair
The chair bothers me more than the razor, honestly.
It’s an armchair, green, kind of ugly, I bought it at an estate sale because it was twenty dollars and I needed something to fill the corner. It sits at roughly a forty-five-degree angle, facing the window. That’s where I put it. That’s where it’s been for three years.
Two mornings ago I walked out of my bedroom and it was facing the hallway.
Not dramatically rotated. Just shifted. Maybe twenty degrees. But enough that the angle was wrong, enough that I noticed immediately, enough that when I sat down in it to drink my tea I realized that from this new position, if you were sitting in it in the dark, you’d have a direct sightline to my bedroom door.
I moved it back. I didn’t say anything about it to anyone. I opened my laptop and started working and tried to think about whether there was any explanation that made sense.
There wasn’t one.
The Flour Idea
I saw it in a comment thread somewhere, years ago. Someone was worried about a roommate going through their stuff and someone else suggested the flour trick – spread it thin near entry points, check in the morning. Low-tech. Feels slightly insane to do in your own home. I remember thinking at the time that it sounded like something from a movie, the kind of detail that only works in fiction.
I did it at 11:47 PM on Tuesday night. I remember the time because I checked my phone right after. I used the bag of all-purpose flour from the back of my pantry, the one I bought eighteen months ago thinking I’d bake something and never did. I spread a thin layer near the front door – just inside the threshold – and a wider patch near the balcony door, which has a little alcove before it opens onto the balcony itself.
Then I went to bed. I didn’t sleep well. I lay there listening to the apartment make its noises, the hum of the refrigerator, a car alarm somewhere on the street, the particular silence of 2 AM in a building where everyone’s asleep.
I woke up at 6:15.
The front door: clean. My own footprints from the night before, nothing else.
The balcony: one print. Heel to toe, pointing in.
I took eleven photos of it before I called Dale.
What I Know and What I Don’t
Here’s what I know.
Someone has been in my apartment. More than once, I think. They come in through the balcony – which means either they’re climbing up from the parking lot, which is possible if you’re athletic and motivated, or they have access to the roof somehow, which is a different kind of terrifying. My building has six units. The super is a man named Frank Cobb who I’ve spoken to maybe four times in three years. There’s a roof access door at the end of the third-floor hallway.
They’re not stealing anything. They’re not destroying anything. They’re making coffee, or they were once. They’re moving furniture. They’re touching my razor.
Here’s what I don’t know.
Why.
And whether they watch me sleep.
That last part I’ve been trying not to think about directly. I keep approaching it and then veering off. If someone sits in that chair in the dark, angled toward my door, while I’m in my bed six feet away with the door open the way I always leave it – I’ve been sleeping with the door closed since Tuesday.
What Happens Now
I bought a doorbell camera yesterday afternoon. The kind that does indoor monitoring too. I’ve got one unit aimed at the balcony door and one in the hallway. They’re recording to a cloud account, thirty-day retention.
I also bought a new lock for the balcony door. The kind with a secondary bolt that you have to operate manually from the inside. A guy named Terry from the hardware store on Clement Street spent twenty minutes explaining the installation to me, and when I told him why I needed it his expression did something I’m still thinking about. Not pity. More like recognition.
I told my friend Donna. She lives in Oakland, we talk maybe once a week. I called her last night and told her the whole thing and she was quiet for a long time and then she said “do you want to stay with me for a while” and I said I didn’t know yet.
The police took the shoeprint photos. They said they’d look into it. I don’t know what that means, practically speaking.
And here’s the thing I keep coming back to.
Whoever it is – they’ve been careful. The razor, the chair, the coffee smell. These aren’t accidents. They’re not careless. They’re someone who knows how to move through a space without leaving much behind, who slipped up once with the flour, who has been doing this long enough that they got comfortable.
That last part. The comfortable part.
That’s the thing that keeps me standing in the kitchen at 6 AM, mug of tea going cold in my hand, watching the balcony door.
I installed the cameras. I changed the lock. I closed my bedroom door.
But I still woke up this morning to a smell I couldn’t place.
Not coffee this time.
Cigarette smoke. Faint. Just at the edge of the hallway.
I don’t smoke. I’ve never smoked. And the cameras – when I checked the footage from overnight – showed nothing.
Just four hours of an empty hallway, and then me, walking into it.
—
If this made your skin crawl, pass it along to someone who won’t sleep tonight either.
If you’re in the mood for more unexpected twists and turns, you won’t want to miss reading about the brother who moved his family in without asking or the wild tale of a woman who demanded a wheelchair at Walmart. And for a truly jaw-dropping family drama, check out the story where a brother announced he was going to be a father, and the mother was sitting right there.
