The next morning, I pretended to leave for work. I drove out, pushed the car back into the garage, and hid under my bed. Hours crept by in suffocating silence. Then, around 11:20 a.m., the front door opened. Footsteps moved through my home with casual confidence. When the man entered my bedroom and muttered, “You always leave such a mess, Marcus…” my blood ran cold. He knew my name. And his voice sounded familiar.
When he crouched to look under the bed, I rolled away and scrambled up. Seeing his face felt like looking into an altered reflection—similar but not identical. He raised his hands calmly. “You weren’t supposed to be here,” he said. His name was Adrian. He claimed he’d been living in my house during the day for months and, even worse, that he had a key—given to him by my father. The father who died when I was nineteen.
