Surprisingly, they didn’t care for my midnight labors.

One morning, when Don was getting himself set up at his rig to work, he started digging through the drawers of his desk with increasingly sharp movements, until he yelled out, “Where the hell are my headphones?”

I had to retrieve them from wherever it was I had placed them the night before during one of my shambling, zombie-eyed organizing sprees, and he snatched them from my hands. “You shouldn’t put things where they don’t belong,” he snapped, before closing the headphones over his ears.

Often I would catch a few hours of sleep close to dawn, when I had exhausted myself silly with all the nighttime working. But until then, I got to know that house intimately, saw into all its secret shadowed places that Don and Liz never saw, as they tended to sleep through the night. Until that last night, of course.

It was sometime after midnight and I was lying awake, running through possible tasks in my mind to see if I could fall asleep just by imagining I was doing something, when inevitably there was a petulant creak, which at first I chalked up to the house settling. But when I tried to go back to my mental exercise, there was the creak again, this time unmistakably the sound of a footstep, weight shifting on the floorboards.

Someone was in the house.

My breath caught in my throat as I listened to the slow, heavy footsteps creeping down the hallway, footsteps that didn’t belong there. I tried to remember if I had checked all the windows and doors that night, but I couldn’t recall doing so, and let’s face it, Don and Liz were fairly careless with that sort of thing, so who knows, there could have been a wide-open invitation somewhere for an intruder looking to steal inside. My gut twisted, sick with dread.

I reached out and felt around the coffee table to the left of the couch until my hand met the cold glass encasing of a candle. It smelled cloyingly of apples and spice, some heady autumn scent, and I pulled the heavy candle close to me as I sat up. On fleet, silent feet, I prowled over to the hallway and lay in wait for the figure’s passing. When the shape of him stepped out of the hall and into the living room, I shouted and swung the candle.

The man cried out and doubled over, one hand on his left eye, and with a sinking feeling somewhere beneath my furious heart, I recognized the sound of his voice.

“What the hell?”

The hall light blinked on as Elizabeth came stumbling out in her pajamas, hair mussed with sleep. “What is going on?”

Don straightened, still holding a palm over his injured eye. The candle lay somewhere on the floor.

“What were you doing?” I demanded, my voice rising defensively.

“I was going for a smoke,” he confessed, and sure enough, he had a pack of cigarettes in his hand.