Chapter 1: The Note
“If you do not stop that baby from screaming, we are going to report you to the building management.”
The note was folded tightly inside my mailbox, written in jagged blue ink on a piece of paper clearly torn from a cheap spiral notebook. I read the words once, then I read them again, and finally, I scanned them a third time just to make sure I was not losing my mind.
My name was not written on the envelope, but since they had placed it directly into my personal mailbox, there was no doubt that the message was meant for me. The problem was fundamentally impossible: I did not have a baby, nor did I have any children living in my home.
I lived with my husband, Xavier, in a cozy, two-bedroom apartment in a quiet residential district of Columbus. We were both professionals who spent the majority of our day away from the house.
I worked as a lead accountant at a firm near Broad Street, while Xavier managed operations at a logistics company downtown. Our lives were governed by a strict, almost military-like routine where we left early, returned exhausted, heated up whatever was left in the fridge, and went to bed.
It was a predictable, calm existence, or at least that is what I had believed until this morning. I tried to convince myself that the note was just a simple, stupid mistake.
Maybe one of the neighbors had mixed up the floor number, or perhaps the crying was drifting through the ventilation shafts from another unit entirely. But as the morning hours dragged on, that phrase kept circling in my brain like a trapped fly buzzing against a window.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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