I rang her doorbell several times. She wasn’t answering, and it took all the willpower I had not to bang on the door or start to throw rocks at her window. I began to walk away slowly, aimlessly, when I came up to the dog park, and on a whim, I pushed the gate open and stepped inside.

I don’t know why I was there; maybe I was too scared to go home and be by myself, too worried to call Keith to bother him with this. He’d wanted to cut his trip short after he found out about the break-in, but I told him not to, that this trip was a big deal for him, and there was no reason to come home early when I was perfectly fine.

But I wasn’t fine. Not even close.

So I stalled. I walked farther into the park, the warm breeze tickling my face. As I stepped through the gates, I had the same thought I’d had the first time I’d visited the park: if I were coming here at another time, under other circumstances, maybe, just maybe, it could have been a place that Shelby and I frequented. I wondered what it would be like to be able to afford one of the luxury homes on the block, to spend my afternoons with Shelby tucked away in this perfect, manufactured space.

I sat down on the bench where I’d first met Emma and Andrew and listened to the leaves being pushed around by the wind.

As I sat there, I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye, and I blinked.

I brushed it off as nothing, but then it happened again, and I squinted, looking around the park. I looked up as it happened again, and I saw a small light coming from an apartment on the second floor of the building across the park. I squinted, standing up, and looked up at it in the dark.

The events of the past few nights had me on edge, and I felt my stomach flop over in fear. I should have been carrying a weapon with me, at least my bottle of bug spray. More than that, I shouldn’t have been sitting out here alone. I was turning to head back to the street when I saw a figure in the window, and I realized that someone was standing there, holding the object that was being shone into my face.

A flashlight.

Again.

“What the hell?” I said out loud. The figure moved away, and I stood there for a few moments, looking up at the window. With the light gone, I could see that I was looking into a shadowy room that might have been a bedroom? A den?