It had made all the difference and, what’s more, only cost a fraction of what the therapist charged for a handful of pointless conversations. It had even given her enough energy to go back to the gym.

She took a deep breath, filling her lungs like she’d learned in yoga class, and reached out for the phone on her bedside table. But when she turned the alarm off, she noticed something strange the second before the screen went black.

She didn’t actually allow herself to check her phone in bed. Turning her alarm on and off was the only exception to the rule. In her new life, her bed was a screen-free zone, along with the bathroom and the dinner table. And yet she couldn’t stop herself from tapping in her PIN and unlocking it.

She looked at the screen again, uncomprehending.

To someone who didn’t know what it normally looked like, it would probably have seemed neither odd nor unsettling. But she did know, and as she looked at it, she felt panic starting to build. Before long, the pressure around her chest was so tight she couldn’t breathe.

Her first thought was that it wasn’t her phone. But the chip in the top left corner from when she dropped it was there, and the home button glitched just like it had been doing over the past few weeks.

Everything was right.

Everything except the background picture.

It should have been a picture of Smilla, her brown and white Boston terrier who had died three years ago from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. But it wasn’t a picture of Smilla.

Instead, it was a picture of her.

A picture of her, sleeping in her own bed, wearing the exact same T-shirt she was wearing right now. Even the toothpaste stain from last night was there, which meant the picture had been taken in the past eight hours. So someone had broken into her flat.

Maybe it was just a technical malfunction. Or some new camera function she had accidentally activated when she went to bed. But no, the picture was taken from above. Someone must have been in her bedroom.

Was someone having her on? One of the many nocturnal guests she’d brought home over the past few years, who had made a copy of her keys? Though she had no idea how that could have happened without her noticing. Or was it a warning from someone at work that she’d been too ruthless there?

The questions bounced around like ping-pong balls. Granted, there were likely disgruntled people among the staff, but hard as she tried, she couldn’t think of anyone who’d be twisted enough to do something like this.

Then it struck her.

What if he was still in the flat. What if he was standing right outside her bedroom door, waiting for her. Or what if he was inside the…