…”…phone. And your apartment. He has a key.” I dropped the phone on the couch and ran to the front door. The chain was off. I always put the chain on. I had put it on that night. I remembered doing it.
I locked myself in the car, drove to the police station in my pajamas, and handed them my phone. A detective in the cybercrime unit listened to both voicemails twice. “This isn’t you,” he said. “It’s an AI voice clone. Someone recorded you talking and trained a program on it. It’s very good.”
“Then how did he know about the coffee?” I asked. He turned my phone around. “You spill coffee on your sleeve every weekday at 7:42,” he said gently. “When the train turns the corner by the bridge. It’s on your own doorbell camera. Someone has been watching your footage.”
The man in the red scarf was real. The police found him on the platform the next morning, waiting for my train. His name was Kyle. My ex. We’d broken up two years ago. He’d kept a copy of my apartment key, installed a hidden app on my phone before we split, and watched me ever since.
The voicemails had been his idea of a game. “He wanted you to feel like you were going crazy,” the detective said. “Then he wanted to be the person who rescued you when you finally got scared enough.”
Kyle was charged with stalking, wiretapping, and burglary. I got a protective order, a new phone, new locks, and new doorbell footage settings. The detective set it all up himself.
Two weeks later, at 11:11 p.m., my phone rang. My own number. My heart stopped. I answered. It was the detective, calling from a test line. “Just checking that the old spoofing trick doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “It doesn’t. Go to sleep.” I did. For the first time in weeks.
