Blindly, I reached out, my fingers brushing the shade of the lamp before finding the tiny switch. I flipped the light on and a soft glow spread across the living room, but the shadows seemed to have darkened everywhere else.

Reaching into my purse, I wrapped my hand around my cell phone and pulled it out. I quietly inched forward, placing my purse on the recliner. Holding on to my phone, I went into the kitchen, turning on lights.

Nothing out of place.

As I opened up the dishwasher, half expecting to find a bra-­and-­panty set stuffed in there, my breath hitched in my throat as my ears strained to hear sound.

Something—­something came from the back of the house, where my bedrooms were. The sound of a door shutting softly? I wasn’t sure.

I spun around, heart racing. Fear tiptoed over my skin. Had I heard a door closing? Or was it just my imagination? At this point, I couldn’t be sure, but I grabbed a huge-­ass psycho butcher knife out of its block.

Taking a deep breath, I made my way through the entire apartment. Nothing was out of the ordinary, no doors open when they shouldn’t be or vice versa, and with all the lights on, even the bathroom’s, I plopped down on the bed, sighing.

I really needed to go to the local church and order an exorcism.

Glancing down at the scary knife I still held, I sat it on the bed beside me and then I looked at the phone. I could totally text Reece. Tell him I thought I heard something in my apartment. He would come over, and it wouldn’t be a lie, but . . .

But it wouldn’t be right.

That . . . that was like reaching a whole new level of desperation, and I wasn’t to that point. Yet.

I didn’t get much sleep. Weirded out by the way my apartment felt when I entered and everything else that had been going on, I woke up every hour until the sun rose and then I finally gave up.

At the butt crack of dawn, I found myself in my studio. The Jackson Square painting forgotten, I stared at a blank piece of canvas and then I grabbed my paintbrush. There wasn’t any thought behind what I was doing. My hand had a mind of its own. I was on autopilot. Hours passed, and my back and neck ached from sitting so long in virtually the same position.

Rubbing the cramp in my lower back, I leaned back in the stool. I tilted my head to the side and muttered, “Fuck me.”

The background of the painting was the robin’s egg blue of my kitchen walls and the bright white of the cabinets. No big deal there, but it was what was in the center of the painting that made me want to get a lobotomy.