I almost gasped. I bit my knuckle so hard I tasted copper. She knew his name. She knew everything. This wasn’t a crime of opportunity; this was a dissection of my life.
Her phone rang. The sound shattered the surreal calm of the room.
“Hello? Yes, I’m here,” she said, pacing the room. I watched her bare feet track back and forth. “No, she’s at work. The stupid cow never checks. I told you, she’s a zombie. She walks through life asleep.”
She laughed—a high-pitched, humorless sound that Mrs. Collins must have heard through the walls.
“I’ll have left before six,” she continued. “Like always. Always. I leave everything exactly as it was. She’s staring right at it and doesn’t see it. It’s pathetic, really.”
She sat back down on the bed, right above my head.
“I tried on the wedding dress today,” she whispered into the phone, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial purr. “It’s a little loose in the waist, but I think I pull it off better. She doesn’t deserve this house, you know. She doesn’t appreciate the silence. She just fills it with sadness.”
The cruelty of her words cut deeper than any knife. This stranger wasn’t just stealing my shelter; she was judging my grief. She was consuming my existence, digesting it, and spitting it out with contempt.
“I have to go,” she said suddenly. “I’m going to take a nap. In our bed.”
She hung up. I heard the phone hit the nightstand. Then, the terrifying sound of a zipper. The rustle of denim sliding down legs.
She was going to sleep on top of me.
For two hours, I lay under that bed, serving as the literal foundation for my tormentor’s rest. I could hear her breathing—slow, rhythmic, peaceful.
I was trapped in a coffin of my own making. If I moved, she would wake up. If I tried to crawl out, I would be vulnerable, on my hands and knees. I didn’t know if she was armed. I didn’t know if the person she was talking to was on their way.
I dissociated. I floated away from my body, analyzing the situation as if it were a claim file.
Claimant: Elena.
Incident: Home Invasion / Identity Theft.
Risk Level: Critical.
My phone battery was at 12%. I had the video. I had the evidence. But evidence doesn’t stop a bullet or a knife.
Finally, around 3:30 PM, she stirred. The bed creaked. She groaned, stretching.
“Time to go, Laura,” she muttered to herself. Laura. Her name was Laura.
She wiped the perfume bottle with the hem of her shirt to remove fingerprints.
It was methodical. It was practiced. It was terrifyingly professional.
She walked out of the bedroom. I heard her in the kitchen again. The sound of a glass being washed, dried, and placed back in the cupboard.
Then, the front door opened and closed. The lock clicked.
Silence rushed back into the house, but it was no longer empty. It was heavy with her presence.
I waited ten minutes. I counted to six hundred, my lips moving silently in the dust. Only then did I drag myself out from under the bed.
My legs collapsed under me. I crawled to the window, peering through the blinds. The street was empty.
I scrambled for my phone and dialed 9-1-1.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“There was someone in my house,” I sobbed, the dam finally breaking. “She… she was pretending to be me.”
The police arrived within eight minutes. Two uniformed officers, Officer Miller and Officer Hernandez. They looked skeptical at first—another hysterical woman in a quiet suburb—until I played the video.
I saw the color drain from Officer Miller’s face as he watched the footage of the feet, the voice mocking me, the admission of using my wedding dress.
“Stay here, ma’am,” he said, his hand resting on his holster.
They swept the house. This time, they found what I had missed.
Behind the exterior electrical box on the side of the house, taped to the inside of the metal panel, was a key. A shiny, fresh copy of my front door key.
In the bottom of the kitchen trash can, beneath a layer of coffee grounds I had deposited that morning, they found a wrapper for a granola bar I didn’t buy.
And in the attic—a place I hadn’t checked in a year—they found a sleeping bag rolled up in the corner, along with a stack of my mail that had gone missing over the last few months. She hadn’t just been visiting; she had been curating a life.
That night, they set a trap. Not me—I was staying at a hotel, unable to step foot in that violated space—but the police.
They tracked the phone number she had called. It belonged to a voicemail service, likely a dead end, or perhaps a therapy hotline she was abusing. But they didn’t need the phone. They knew she would come back. She said it herself: Always.
The next day, Laura Bennett was arrested walking up my driveway at 10:00 AM. She was carrying a bag of groceries.
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