…”It’s Danny. Don’t trust the landlord. Call me.” I sat down on the porch steps with the key in my hand and couldn’t stand up for a long time. Danny is my older brother. We haven’t spoken in five years. The last thing I said to him, at our mother’s funeral, was that I never wanted to see his face again.
I called the number on the back of the tag. He answered on the first ring. “I’m sorry I scared you,” he said, and his voice broke. “I didn’t know how else to do it. I knew if I knocked, you’d shut the door.” He told me everything. After rehab, he got a night job as a security guard at the property office that manages my building. In April, he found a drawer in the landlord’s desk full of tenant keys. Each one labeled. Mine was in there, the one I thought I’d lost in March.
The line he highlighted on my lease was clause 14: “Landlord may enter the premises at any time for inspection.” “He goes into apartments at night,” Danny said. “Women who live alone. I saw it on the office cameras. I couldn’t prove it yet. So I started coming to your door every night after my shift, checking the little piece of tape I put on your lock. Four minutes. Then I’d drive home.”
“And the trash cans?” I asked. He laughed, and it sounded like when we were kids. “You always forgot them. Mom used to make me do it.”
That afternoon, Danny brought the office camera footage to the police himself. The landlord was arrested two weeks later. Five other tenants came forward. The detective told me that whoever had been standing at my door every night had probably kept him from coming in.
I invited Danny for dinner that Sunday. He brought the trash cans in from the curb before he even knocked. We talked until two in the morning. At 2:14, he looked at the clock, smiled, and said, “Old habit.” Then he checked my lock one more time before he drove home. He still does, every Sunday. Only now, he knocks.
