I bought the doorbell camera three weeks after Daniel moved out, which tells you most of what you need to know about the state I was in.
I did not think anyone was going to break into the house. That was not it. The house is on a quiet loop in a town in Ohio where the most dramatic thing that happened in nine years was a mailbox getting hit by a truck. It was that I had never lived alone. I went from my parents’ house to a dorm to a shared apartment to Daniel, and at thirty-four I was on my own in a three-bedroom in November with all the lights on, and buying a camera was a thing I could do.
It arrived on a Tuesday. I put it up myself, badly, and it hung about eight degrees off level for the entire time this happened, which I mention because in every clip the driveway sits at a slight tilt and I still can’t look at a level photograph of that house without it seeming wrong.
The app pings your phone when it sees motion. For the first three nights it pinged for a cat, twice, and for a plastic bag.
On the fourth night it pinged at 3:07 in the morning.
I was awake. I was awake most nights then, which I’d stopped treating as a problem and started treating as a schedule.
The notification said MOTION AT FRONT DOOR and the thumbnail was black with a grey shape in it, and I opened it expecting the cat.
There was a man standing at the end of my driveway.
Not on the porch. Not near the house. At the end of the driveway where it meets the sidewalk, about forty feet from the camera, at the edge of what the streetlight reached. He was facing the house.
He was just standing there.
I watched the clip through twice and then I sat up and put the light on and went and checked the front door was locked, which it was, and the back door, which it was, and then I stood in my own hallway holding my phone with my heart going and watched it a third time.
The clip is fifty-one seconds long because that’s how long the camera records for. He is in frame for all fifty-one seconds. He does not move except to shift his weight once. At no point does he come closer.
At the end of the clip he is still standing there, and then it stops, because the camera stops.
Here’s the part that made the next three months what they were.
I went back into the app in the morning and scrolled the history, and the camera had recorded him again at 3:11. And at 3:15. Three clips, three minutes apart, each fifty-one seconds, because the motion sensor kept re-triggering on the same stationary man every time it reset.
He was at the end of my driveway from 3:07 until at least 3:16.
Nine minutes. In November. In Ohio, at three in the morning, at thirty-one degrees, a man stood at the end of my driveway for nine minutes in the dark looking at my house.
Then in the 3:15 clip, at about the forty-second mark, he turns and walks out of frame to the left, down the sidewalk, at a completely ordinary walking pace.
Not hurrying. Not looking back.
I called the police at nine in the morning, which in hindsight was a mistake — not calling them, but waiting until nine, because by nine it’s a curiosity and at three it’s a call-out.
The officer who came was maybe twenty-six and extremely polite and completely useless, and I don’t entirely blame him.
He watched the clips on my phone at my kitchen table. He agreed it was strange. Then he explained, in the careful voice of a person who has explained this before, that the sidewalk is public property, that standing on a public sidewalk is not an offence, that the man had not approached the house, touched anything, said anything, or made any gesture, and that there was, at that point, nothing to attach a report to.
I asked what would have to happen.
He said, “If he comes up the driveway, call us immediately.”
I have thought about that sentence a great deal since. It is not an unreasonable thing for him to have said. It is also, when you are a woman living alone and you have just been told that the system activates at the property line, a genuinely terrible thing to be told.
He did say one useful thing before he left. He said: does he come every night?
I said I didn’t know. It had been one night.
He came every night.
Not approximately. Not most nights. Every night, for nineteen consecutive nights, between 3:04 and 3:11, standing at the end of the driveway facing the house, for between six and fourteen minutes, and then walking away to the left at an ordinary pace.
I know the exact figures because by night six I had started a spreadsheet, which is what I do instead of panicking, and by night twelve the spreadsheet had four columns and I was sleeping between about 4:30 and 7.
On the eleventh night it snowed.
And in the morning I put a coat on over my pyjamas and walked down my own driveway in the light with my phone in my hand, and I found what I had known I was going to find and had spent the whole night telling myself I wouldn’t.
Two footprints, side by side, deep and clear, filled with an inch of fresh snow that had fallen on top of them.
He hadn’t paced. He hadn’t shifted around. He had stood in one spot, with his feet together, for long enough that the snow had packed down under him.
And the footprints were not pointing at the house.
They were pointing across the road.