I found myself in front of the doors to my apartment building, the burglar long gone. Lou, I thought to myself. Lou will help me. I banged on the door to Lou’s apartment but it wasn’t the friendly older man who answered. It was a young woman. She had her hair back in a wet messy bun, like she’d showered and just scraped it back afterward. She had on loose pajama pants and a black T-shirt.

I told her I’d just gotten robbed. At that point I didn’t even care who she was. I just needed to sit down. I remember she gently pried the baseball bat out of my fingers. I hadn’t even realized I was still carrying it.

She called the police, brought me inside Lou’s apartment. She dug out some sweatpants and a hoodie for me to wear. I vaguely remembered having seen Lou wear them at some point or another. The woman told me that she was Lou’s daughter. That she was taking over his job as the building’s superintendent for a while. She brought me a glass of water and sat shoulder to shoulder with me on Lou’s couch. We waited for the cops together.

When they finally came, she met them at the front door and then the two of us led them up to my apartment. I answered question after question. Turns out, the guy didn’t end up taking much of anything besides the cash he found in the vase. Everything else he’d taken was in the bag he’d dropped before he’d run. My phone and computers were in there. A waterproof Bluetooth speaker I kept in the shower. And that’s the one that really got me. He’d even been in my bathroom.

The cabinets in my kitchen were all open. There was even a glass of orange juice sitting on the countertop that I was positive hadn’t been mine.

The cops guessed that he thought I was out of town for some reason. There was no reason a burglar would stop and drink a glass of orange juice unless he thought he was totally alone.

I gave them a description of the burglar, told them about the gun. About the gloves. They took pictures and did all sorts of cop stuff. It was dawn by the time they left. Jessie stayed. The cops had told me that I could clean everything up. I didn’t need to keep it the way it was for any reason. So, Jessie helped me do that, too. We didn’t really talk.