I would chase after her, but my feet are glued to the sidewalk. Besides. Let’s really think about what I’m dealing with right now. This is a woman who did not want me to know her identity. Probably, I’m realizing, because she lives in my building and I technically help pay her salary. And she just power-walked away from me on the street. If this were a television show, I’d probably be expected to run after her and make a speech. But this is real life. And in real life, you don’t chase down women on the street when they’ve made it very clear that they want to put a lot of distance between the two of you.

But still.

I watch her long legs eat up the rest of the block and then she turns the corner into our apartment building.

I cannot believe it’s her.

I cannot believe I know who JD is.

“Why were you staring in horror at our superintendent?” Frida Hawkins asks me as she appears at my elbow.

“Whoa!” I jump an inch off the ground. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough to see you look at Jessie like you just realized she was Pennywise the Clown.”

“Jessie.” I hate so much that I’m learning JD’s real name from Frida. I also hate that I was too much of a twerp to ask again for my new super’s name after I forgot it the first time.

“Horror, you said?” I ask Frida in confusion. “That wasn’t horror on my face. That was shock.”

“Looked like horror to me.”

Okay, so if I’m being honest with myself, there might have been a dash of horror mixed in to my expression.

How do I explain this?

All right, it’s probably pertinent to explain about the first night I met JD. I mean Jessie. She was Jessie before she was JD. She’s still Jessie. She was always Jessie.

God. Maybe if I hadn’t met her on the worst night of my life I wouldn’t have such a hard time merging JD and Jessie into one person. But here we are.

It was two and a half months ago. I used to sleep like the dead. Passed out in a pile. I used to need two different alarm clocks placed in different locations to get me out of bed. I used to sleep like a champ. But that night I blinked awake at 3 a.m. Something had pulled me out of my dream. I still remember that in the dream I was in a bookstore but every time I went to pull a book off the shelf it would end up being a sandwich.

Regardless, I sat up in bed and froze because I heard a noise coming from my living room. It was a crunching sort of thump. And then there were footsteps.

Someone was in my apartment.