He opens his hands wide. “I was just passing by and I wondered about the empty unit.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m just staying here while my friend travels.”
“Ah. When will she return?” He holds perfectly still, his face a mask revealing nothing. But I feel a shift as he waits for my answer, as if whatever I tell him is of the utmost importance.
When will she return.
“She’s out of the country,” I finally say, wanting to put as much space as possible between Eva and this man.
He nods as if this explains something, a smirk curling the corners of his mouth. He steps closer to me, reaching out to pluck something from my shoulder. “Spiderweb,” he says. But he maintains his proximity, and I feel the heat of him, the smell of cigarettes and cologne enveloping me, and I shrink back toward Eva’s door, wondering suddenly if he might follow me inside.
He gestures toward Eva’s front door and says, “I know this looks like a good neighborhood, but you really shouldn’t leave that unlocked for any length of time, especially at this time of night. Berkeley isn’t as safe as it seems.”
I feel as if he’s punched me, my chest constricting into a tight ball that makes it hard to breathe. Without responding, I grab the knob and twist, slipping inside, locking the door behind me.
I hear him say, “Thank you for your help,” before descending the stairs again. I scour the room, searching for any hint that he’s been inside.
But everything is as I left it. My bags, undisturbed by the wall, nothing amiss. I sniff the air, but there’s no trace of his cologne. He couldn’t have been inside. I was in the garage for less than five minutes. I press my fingers against my eyes, trying to hold myself together, trying to think rationally amidst the panic racing through me.
I enter the kitchen and nearly step in the puddle of Diet Coke, which has spread out from the tipped-over can, traveling all the way toward the shelves and under it. My eyes follow the path, catching on the cast wheels of the shelving unit. I bend farther down, being careful not to kneel in the brown liquid, and peer underneath, where the Coke has pooled up against the bottom edge of a doorframe.
I circle around to the end of the unit, pushing it forward until I’m looking at a door with a padlock looped through a steel hinge. “What the hell, Eva,” I mutter.
I grab her keys again and find the one that pops the lock, and when the door opens, I feel around on the wall for a light switch, turning it on. A fan below me begins to whir, and I creep down a small set of stairs that leads into a tiny basement that might have been a laundry room at one point.
But it’s not a laundry room anymore. Counters and shelves line the walls, with a small sink and portable dishwasher in the corner. Ingredients are arranged on the shelves—large containers of calcium chloride, at least thirty bottles of various cold and cough medicines. A camping stove sits in the corner, several silicone pill molds upturned next to the sink, as if to dry. High above me in the wall is a boarded up window, the fan centered in it, spinning.
To the left of the stairs is a counter strewn with papers and a voice recorder next to them. I lean over, reluctant to touch anything, and begin reading what appears to be a notarized letter to someone named Agent Castro.
My name is Eva James and this is a sworn statement of events beginning twelve years ago all the way through the present, January 15 of this calendar year. I read quickly, the pages turning faster, the story of a college student who just wanted to fit in. Who took the only option she believed was available at the time, latching on to a man named Dex, who promised her things he had no intention of ever giving her. A life. Happiness. Freedom. It’s the story of a woman who was tired of the corner she’d been forced into, a woman ready to burn it all down on her way out.
Eva wasn’t a con artist or an identity thief. She was a woman like me, for whom the world will never bend, trying to set her path straight.
I pick up the voice recorder and press Play. The sound of a sports arena fills