…”For Luke. Who always has my back.”
I called my brother at 3 a.m. with my hands shaking so hard I could barely hold the phone. He picked up half asleep. I didn’t say hello. I said, “Where is the watch I gave you?”
There was a long pause. “I lost it,” he said. “Back in August. At the gym. Someone cleaned out my locker. Why?”
I sent him the photo. I heard him get out of bed. “Lock your bedroom door,” he said. “I’m coming over. I’m calling the police from the car.”
The officer who came looked at the photo, the Venmo requests, and the metadata, and asked my brother a question I hadn’t thought of. “What else was in your locker that day?”
His keys. On his keyring was my spare apartment key, which he’s had since I moved in. He’d gotten his keys back from the gym’s lost and found two days later, so he never thought about it again.
And then my brother went very pale, and said there was one more thing. He keeps a note on his phone with my passwords, “for emergencies,” because I’d asked him to. His phone had been in that locker too.
The police traced the Venmo accounts to a man who’d been a member at my brother’s gym. He’d had a copy of my key made, used my password to get into my cloud account, and come into my apartment at night more than once. The “Thursday” requests were the nights he’d been inside.
He was arrested two weeks later and charged with stalking and burglary. My landlord changed my locks the day the officer came. My brother deleted that note, and then he spent an entire weekend helping me turn on two-factor authentication on every account I’ve ever had.
The police gave the watch back to him after the case closed. He wears it every day. Last week he took it off and showed me the back. He’d had a second line engraved under mine. “And she has mine.”
