I came home to Columbus sixty-two days earlier than anyone expected me. There was no one I had told, no message sent ahead, no arrangement made, because the trip that had kept me away for two months had ended the way such things sometimes do, abruptly and without ceremony, and I had wanted nothing more than to walk into my own quiet apartment and sleep in my own bed and let the strangeness of the past weeks settle behind me. I did not get that. What I got instead was Harold Benson stepping in front of me the moment the elevator doors opened, his face the color of old paper, his hand closing around my wrist.
Harold was seventy-four, a retired mail carrier who had lived across the hall from me in Franklin Towers for nearly twelve years. He was the calmest man in the building, the sort of man whose largest daily grievance was the performance of the Cleveland Guardians, which he complained about every morning in the lobby over a paper cup of coffee after watering the flowers by the entrance. In all the years I had known him I had never once seen him afraid. That afternoon he was terrified.
“Daniel,” he whispered, glancing back over his shoulder toward my door, toward apartment 10B. “Please. Tell whoever is staying in your place to keep the noise down. None of us have slept in weeks.”
For a moment I thought it was a joke, some misunderstanding I could laugh off and correct. Then I saw his eyes.
“Harold, I think you’ve got the wrong apartment.”
“I’m talking about 10B.”
“That’s mine.”
“I know it’s yours.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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