At ten past three, the handle started moving slowly, exactly like it had in the recordings. I stayed in the dark with my hand on the chair I’d wedged beneath the knob and listened. Whoever was outside didn’t knock or call my name. They simply turned the handle, stopped, waited, and tried again. Then I heard something scrape softly against the bottom of the door before the footsteps moved away.
I waited until the hallway was completely quiet before opening the door. There was nobody on the porch, but something had been left on the mat. It was a small envelope with my name written across it in handwriting I recognized immediately. My husband had been dead for three years, but that was unmistakably his handwriting, down to the way he crossed the letter “t.”
Inside was a single photograph of our house taken from across the street. The date printed on the back was from two months before my husband died. I stared at it for a long time before noticing a second detail: the upstairs bedroom window was open, and someone was standing behind the curtain. I had been asleep in that room that night, and my husband had already been in the hospital.
I called my neighbor the next morning and showed him the photograph. He went pale and told me the cameras had recorded something else he hadn’t shown me yet. On several of the forty-one nights, the person never approached my door at all. They stood across the street for exactly three minutes, watching my upstairs window. Then, on the forty-second night, the footage showed them walking straight toward my house — carrying the same photograph I’d found on my doorstep.
