I called Wyatt before I even tried touching the lock.
“Again?” he asked.
“Again.”
There was silence on the line for maybe two seconds.
Then his voice changed.
“Don’t go inside.”
I looked automatically toward the dark windows of my house.
“Why?”
“Because whoever’s doing this knows when you’re gone. And if they know when you’re gone, we don’t know what else they know.”
That thought hadn’t fully occurred to me until he said it.
Suddenly, my little house didn’t look warm or familiar anymore.
It looked like a sealed box.
And I had no idea what might be waiting inside.
Wyatt arrived twelve minutes later, but this time he wasn’t carrying only his tool bag.
Under one arm was a small black security camera.
“I took it off my garage,” he said. “Battery-powered. Motion activated. Records to a memory card and sends alerts to my phone.”
“You’re putting that on my porch?”
“No.”
He pointed toward the maple tree near the edge of my yard.
“I’m putting it where whoever’s doing this won’t see it.”
First, he cleared the toothpick from the lock.
Then we walked through the entire house together.
Every room.
Every closet.
Every window.
Nothing appeared disturbed.
No drawers were open.
No valuables were missing.
The back door was still locked.
The windows were latched from the inside.
There were no footprints beneath them.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed.
It wasn’t the house.
It was me.
For the first time since I bought that place seven years earlier, I kept looking over my shoulder inside my own hallway.
Wyatt noticed.
“You want to stay at my place tonight?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“If somebody wants to scare me out of my own house, I’m not making it that easy.”
He gave me the look older brothers give when they know arguing won’t accomplish anything.
“Fine. But call me if you hear anything.”
Then he went outside and installed the camera.
He chose a thick branch about eight feet above the ground, tucked behind a knot of dead leaves that had somehow survived the autumn winds. From the porch, I couldn’t see the camera at all.
But when Wyatt showed me the live feed on his phone, the view was perfect.
My front steps.
My door.
Part of the driveway.
And anyone approaching from the road.
“Tomorrow,” he said, handing me the phone, “we find out who your little carpenter is.”
I barely slept.
Every creak of the heating pipes sounded like footsteps.
At 1:17 in the morning, I got out of bed because I thought I heard gravel crunching outside.
Nothing.
At 2:40, I checked the front door.
Still locked.
At 4:05, I finally fell asleep.
My alarm went off fifty minutes later.
By the time I arrived at the clinic, I felt like I’d been awake for three days.
The morning was chaos.
Two nurses had called out sick, the waiting room was full before nine, and one of our elderly patients fainted near reception because he hadn’t eaten before having blood drawn.
For several hours, I almost forgot about the toothpicks.
Almost.
Then, shortly after lunch, my phone buzzed inside my scrub pocket.
I pulled it out.
UNKNOWN NUMBER.
Same area code as the call from the night before.
I stared at it until it stopped ringing.
A minute later, a voicemail notification appeared.
I didn’t listen to it.
I told myself I would later.
Then another patient needed me, and the phone disappeared back into my pocket.
At 6:53 that evening, Wyatt texted.
Camera’s working. No movement yet.
I replied with a thumbs-up and finished my paperwork.
When I finally left the clinic, rain had begun falling.
Not hard.
Just a cold, misty drizzle that turned every streetlight into a blurry yellow halo.
I drove home slower than usual.
The entire way, I kept thinking about that camera.
Maybe nobody would come.
Maybe whoever had been doing it had gotten bored.
Maybe Wyatt had been right the first night and it really was just some stupid teenager.
Then I turned onto my street.
My headlights swept across the porch.
My stomach sank.
Something pale was sticking from the lock.
I parked so quickly that one tire rolled halfway onto the grass.
I didn’t even get out.
I called Wyatt.
“It happened again.”
“I know.”
His voice sounded strange.
Not frightened.
Not angry.
Just… stunned.
“What do you mean, you know?”
“The camera caught it.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“Who?”
Another pause.
“I think you need to watch it yourself.”
“Wyatt, just tell me.”
“I’m coming over.”
“Tell me who it was.”
“I’m five minutes away.”
He hung up.
I sat in my car with the engine running, staring at my front door through the windshield while rain ticked softly against the glass.
Five minutes later, Wyatt’s truck came around the corner.
He parked beside me and climbed into my passenger seat instead of going toward the house.
His face was pale.
That scared me more than anything.
Wyatt was the sort of man who could slice his palm open on sheet metal, wrap it in a shop rag, and finish whatever he was working on before driving himself to urgent care.
But now his hands were trembling slightly as he unlocked his phone.
“You recognize everybody around here better than I do,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“Just watch.”
He opened the recording.
The timestamp read 5:18 P.M.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
My porch sat empty beneath the gray afternoon sky.
Then movement appeared near the right edge of the frame.
A person stepped through the bushes separating my property from the road.
Not a teenager.
Not some drunk.
A woman.
She wore a long beige coat and a dark scarf wrapped around her head.
She moved slowly, almost cautiously, stopping twice to look behind her.
Then she approached my porch.
My skin prickled.
“Zoom in.”
“I already did.”
Wyatt touched the screen.
The image enlarged.
The woman climbed the steps.
She reached into her coat pocket.
Pulled out a toothpick.
And pushed it carefully into my lock.
She didn’t do it angrily.
That was what disturbed me.
She did it methodically.
She pushed it deep.
Snapped it.
Checked that the broken end couldn’t be reached.
Then she stepped backward.
For one second, she looked directly toward the hidden camera.
I stopped breathing.
“Pause it.”
Wyatt froze the frame.
I stared at her face.
Older woman.
Maybe late sixties.
Thin.
Gray hair visible beneath the scarf.
Deep lines around her mouth.
There was something vaguely familiar about her, but I couldn’t place it.
“I don’t know her,” I whispered.
“You sure?”
“I’ve never seen her in my life.”
Wyatt stared at me.
“She seems to know you.”
He resumed the video.
The woman didn’t leave.
Instead, she walked toward my front window.
She cupped both hands around her eyes and looked inside.
My stomach twisted.
Then she did something even stranger.
She knocked.
Three times.
Waited.
Knocked again.
Then she leaned close to the glass and said something.
The camera didn’t have good enough audio to pick it up clearly.
Wyatt increased the volume.
Static.
Rain.
A distant car.
Then the woman’s voice.
Barely audible.
“…please…”
I leaned closer.
Wyatt replayed it.
This time I caught more.
“Please don’t come home.”
Every hair on my arms stood up.
“What did she say?”
Wyatt replayed it again.
There was no mistake.
“Please don’t come home.”
The woman backed away from the window.
But instead of returning toward the road, she walked around the side of my house.
The camera lost sight of her.
“Where did she go?”
“That’s all it recorded,” Wyatt said.
“No. Keep going.”
“There’s nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“The camera caught movement again eleven minutes later.”
He dragged the video timeline forward.
The porch appeared again.
Empty.
Then the woman emerged from the side of my house.
But something was different.
She was running.
Not jogging.
Running.
Her scarf had slipped from her head.
Her coat was open.
And she kept looking backward at my house.
She stumbled near the porch steps, caught herself on the railing, then hurried toward the road.
Just before disappearing from view, she turned around.
And screamed something.
Wyatt paused.
“Listen.”
He raised the volume.
The woman’s voice came through distorted by wind and rain.
“YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE!”
My mouth went dry.
She wasn’t looking toward the camera.
She was looking at my house.
Wyatt and I stared at each other.
“If you weren’t home,” he said slowly, “who was she talking to?”
Neither of us moved.
The rain continued tapping against the windshield.
Then Wyatt reached for the door handle.
“We’re calling the police.”
I caught his arm.
“Wait.”
Something had just clicked in my mind.
The phone calls.
The strange area code.
The voicemail I hadn’t listened to.
I pulled my phone from my pocket.
“What?”
“I got another call today.”
“From who?”
“I don’t know.”
I opened my recent calls.
There it was.
The same unfamiliar number.
Wyatt watched while I opened the voicemail.
The message was nineteen seconds long.
I pressed play.
At first, there was only breathing.
Then a woman spoke.
Her voice was weak and shaky.
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t know me.”
My eyes lifted toward Wyatt.
It was her.
The woman from the video.
“I tried calling yesterday. Please, listen carefully. I know what this sounds like, but you cannot go inside that house tonight.”
My chest tightened.
The message continued.
“I’ve been trying to keep you out long enough to make him leave.”
Wyatt slowly turned toward my house.
The porch was dark.
The windows were black.
The voicemail crackled.
Then the woman said something that made every bit of warmth leave my body.
“He knows what time you come home from the clinic.”
A pause.
“And he’s been inside your house every night before you get there.”
The recording ended.
For several seconds, neither Wyatt nor I spoke.
Then my phone buzzed.
Not a call.
A motion alert.
FROM THE CAMERA.
Wyatt looked down at his phone at exactly the same moment.
His face changed.
“What?”
He didn’t answer.
“Wyatt, what is it?”
He turned the screen toward me.
The live camera feed showed my porch.
Nothing moved.
Then I saw it.
Behind the front window.
The curtain was shifting.
Slowly.
From inside.
Someone was standing in my dark living room.
And as we watched from less than thirty feet away, a hand appeared between the curtains.
A man’s hand.
It pressed against the glass.
Then one finger rose.
And pointed directly toward my car.
He knew we were watching.
And whoever was inside my house…
had been waiting for me to come home.
