…”…you get home Friday night.” I didn’t go home. I called the police from my car and read them the sentence over the phone. This time, nobody shrugged.
A detective met me at a coffee shop an hour later. She read all forty-one entries. “Who knows your real name?” she asked. I thought hard. Almost no one. I changed it at twenty-one, when I moved across the country. My family. My lawyer. And one person from the foster home I lived in when I was a teenager. A boy named Travis, who used to sit outside my door at night.
The detective found him in two hours. Travis Kemp, thirty-six. He’d been out of prison for five years. The same five years the entries started. He’d been attending my open houses under different names, signing the book, walking through houses while I gave tours. I’d shaken his hand at least three times without recognizing him.
On Friday night, I didn’t go home. Two officers did. They waited inside my dark house. At 11:40 p.m., the upstairs bathroom window slid open, and a man climbed in. He was carrying a bouquet of flowers and a photograph of the two of us as teenagers, in the foster home’s backyard.
He was arrested in my bathroom. He kept saying the same thing over and over as they led him out: “I just wanted to tell her hi myself.”
He’s in prison again now. Stalking and burglary. I fixed the bathroom window lock that weekend. Then I fixed every other lock. And on Monday, at my next open house, I did something new. At the top of the guest book, before anyone else could write in it, I signed my own name. “Lena.” My real one. Because I’m done hiding it from people who’ve never meant me any harm.
