…”I think it’s the man you’ve been dating. Greg. He’s my ex-husband. My name is Nora.”
I sat down on the kitchen floor.
“He’s been texting me about you for a month,” she said. “Every morning. Where you’re going. What you’re wearing. He thinks it hurts me, to show me he’s moved on. I wrote it all down, in that notebook, because I recognized what he was doing. He did it to me for six years. When I asked you about cameras, I was hoping you’d say yes. Then at least you’d know.”
The yellow robe was the last straw for her. He’d texted it to her at 7:12 that morning: “She’s wearing the yellow robe. Remember when you had one like that?”
I’d been alone in my house at 7:12. With the curtains closed.
Nora told me to look at the smoke detector in my living room. Greg had “replaced the battery” for me two weeks earlier. I stood on a chair and twisted it off the ceiling. There was a tiny camera lens in the center, where the test button should be.
I called the police. Nora came over from the guest house, and we sat at my kitchen table and waited for them together, two strangers who’d suddenly become the only two people in the world who understood each other.
She gave the police her notebook and a month of his texts. I gave them the smoke detector. Greg was arrested for unlawful surveillance. Detectives found two more cameras in my house, and a folder on his computer named after me.
I refunded Nora’s stay. She wouldn’t take it. Instead, she booked the guest house again for the following month, for a whole week, and paid full price. “I want to come back,” she said, “and just be a guest.”
We drink coffee on my back porch every morning when she visits. I still wear the yellow robe. It’s mine.
