Craigslist Roommate

Chapter 1

For six healthy, happy years... my buddy Bryan and I had a good thing going.

Our apartment was a rent controlled gem located just outside Manhattan. Two bedrooms, two baths, a luxurious view of the city... and nobody to whine about our equally shitty habits. We are not neat guys. We are not exactly dirty either. We sort of just let the place exist around us in this weird no-man's land of laundry piles, old take-out containers, and beer bottles with just a tiny bit left in the bottom. But, as long as those three things never truly overran the floor, as long as the dishes stayed moving from sink to cabinet and back again, and as long as the rent got paid... life was pretty good.

Then Bryan got engaged.

I know that sounds dramatic. I know getting engaged is not exactly the type of thing you're supposed to greet with dread. But you have to understand the context. Bryan had been with Melissa for about eight months at that point and acted like he had discovered air. Suddenly all his free time went to ring shopping and winery weekends and weird little Sunday brunches with people who say things like “charcuterie board” too often. I was happy for him in the abstract. I was also watching my housing situation circle the drain in real time.

The move-out timeline accelerated once they found a one-bedroom in Hoboken they could “totally make work for a year before the wedding.” You know, adorable couple optimism. He gave me two months’ notice and even helped put out feelers for a new roommate. Most of our local friends had already shacked up, escaped to cheaper states, or otherwise developed enough self-respect not to live with me anymore. So I did what any desperate renter in North Jersey eventually does.

I turned to Craigslist.

The ad itself was harmless. Two bedroom available September first. Good light, near transit, no smoking, no pets, men or women okay as long as employed and not insane. Something along those lines. I got the usual flood of weird replies. One guy asked if he could pay half his rent in “graphic design work.” Another wanted to know whether I would permit ferrets. But somewhere in the stack came a message from someone named Aaron. It was short, polite, and written like an actual adult.

*Hi, my name is Aaron. I work in finance in the city and need a room quickly after a recent breakup. I can pay first month and security immediately. I keep to myself and work long hours. If the room is still available, I’d love to stop by tonight.*

Reasonable, right?

That should have comforted me. Instead it bothered me for reasons I couldn't place.

Maybe it was the speed. Maybe the phrase “recent breakup” just felt like the sort of detail people volunteer when they want to sound trustworthy. But the guy had a job, offered money, and used punctuation. That alone moved him into the top ten percent of candidates.

He came by at seven.

Aaron looked ordinary in a way that made him hard to remember five minutes later. Mid-thirties maybe. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Average build. Clean clothes. He wore a navy jacket despite the summer heat and carried no bag. His handshake was dry and firm. His smile did not quite reach the eyes but plenty of people smile that way in the tri-state area because we’re all exhausted and vaguely annoyed at baseline.

We toured the apartment. He asked all the right questions. Commute time. Utilities. Laundry in the building. Street noise. He seemed particularly interested in the locks on the windows and the deadbolt on the front door, which I chalked up to city living. Plenty of people get weird about safety after a breakup or bad building experience. Still normal. Still fine.

Then we got to the room itself. The spare had already been half-cleared out from Bryan’s stuff, so it looked bigger than usual. Aaron stood in the doorway for a long moment without speaking.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

He smiled. “Perfect.”

The word came out a little too soft.

We talked numbers in the kitchen. Aaron produced the security deposit in cash from an envelope inside his jacket. Again, desperate times. I told myself cash was good. Cash was easy. Cash meant this problem might be over before it really began. He said he could move in by the weekend. I said that worked. We shook on it.

Right before he left, Aaron paused by the living room window and looked down at the street six floors below.

“Do people ever watch from across the way?” he asked.

I laughed because the building opposite ours was close enough that you *could* absolutely see into neighboring apartments if the blinds were open.

“Sure,” I said. “Peeping Tom city.”

He nodded like I had confirmed something important.

“Good to know.”

I should have ended it there.

But again, rent.

Aaron moved in Saturday afternoon with one rolling suitcase, a duffel bag, and six cardboard boxes all labeled in black marker with just dates. No furniture. No framed photos. No obvious kitchenware or bedding outside a folded gray comforter strapped on top of one box. He didn’t ask for help carrying anything and in fact seemed mildly irritated when I offered.

“I'm alright,” he said. “I prefer to know where my things have been.”

Weird answer. Not weird enough.

The first night with a new roommate always carries a little awkward energy. I gave him space. He gave me less than I expected. Instead of holing up in his room, Aaron sat in the living room with me for almost three hours watching a Yankees game he didn’t seem to care about. He asked questions that started normal and then drifted slightly off.

How often did Bryan visit now?

Did neighbors ever come by unannounced?

Did I sleep heavily?

Had anyone ever accidentally gotten mail sent here after moving out?

I answered most of it with jokes. He never really laughed, just smiled thinly and kept looking around the apartment in these little quiet sweeps like he was measuring it against a floor plan in his head.

Later that night, I woke up thirsty around two and found Aaron standing in the kitchen completely naked.

Not eating. Not drinking. Just standing there in the dark by the sink with both hands resting on the counter.

The city glow from the window gave him this pale bluish outline. I actually yelped before I could help it.

He turned very slowly.

“Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t sleep.”

I stared at him for a second, trying and failing to be normal about the full-frontal nightmare happening in my kitchen.

“Dude. Pants.”

He looked down at himself as if only then remembering the concept. “Right.”

Then he walked past me to his room, still naked, without any apparent embarrassment.

I locked my bedroom door for the first time in six years.

The next morning, Aaron acted like nothing had happened.

No apology. No acknowledgment. He made coffee, asked if I wanted any, and left for “work” around eight in a perfectly normal suit. I considered bringing it up and decided against it because I genuinely did not know how. *Hey man, maybe don't freeball sleepwalk in common areas?* There's no graceful version of that conversation.

Things got stranger from there.

Small at first.

Objects in the apartment changed places. My razor moved from the medicine cabinet to the bathroom drawer. A framed photo of Bryan and me from a Mets game ended up facedown on the bookshelf. One of my throw blankets disappeared altogether and reappeared folded at the foot of Aaron’s bed when I went in there later looking for a phone charger he claimed not to have seen. Every one of these details had a plausible explanation. New roommate. Shared space. Confusion. But taken together, they started to feel like testing behavior. Like a hand reaching into your life just to see what you’ll notice is missing.

Then came the laundry.

I opened the dryer one Tuesday night and found my entire load had been rearranged by color and folded with a level of care my mother never once extended me. T-shirts stacked. Jeans paired. Socks rolled into perfect little balls. Sitting on top of it all was one of Aaron’s dress shirts.

No note. No explanation.

I waited until he got home to ask.

He loosened his tie in the doorway and gave me a genuinely confused look. “I didn’t do your laundry.”

“Your shirt was in the dryer.”

He glanced past me toward the hall. “Then I guess someone else did.”

He went to bed right after that.

I did not.

That line played on repeat in my head for hours. *Then I guess someone else did.* Said so casually. So matter-of-factly. Like “someone else” was an available option in our two-bedroom apartment and I was silly for not accounting for them.

The following Friday, I came home from work and found Aaron sitting fully conscious on the couch wearing my dead friend’s hoodie.

That sentence needs some explanation.

My college roommate, Nick, died in a car accident two years ago. One of the only things I still had from him was this beat-up Rutgers hoodie he used to leave in my trunk all the time. It lived in the back of my closet. I had not worn it in months. Seeing Aaron in it hit me somewhere primitive.

I didn’t ask. I shouted.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Aaron looked down at the hoodie and touched the fabric near the chest like he’d only just noticed what he had on.

“Oh,” he said. “This was in my room.”

“No it wasn’t.”

He considered me for a long moment.

“Maybe you put it there and forgot.”

That was when I started planning how to get him out.

The trouble was the lease. The cash. The total lack of obvious legal grounds beyond him being weird in ways a landlord would absolutely dismiss. So instead of kicking him out dramatically like in the movies, I texted Bryan and asked if I was overreacting. He said yes, probably. Melissa said maybe Aaron was “just going through a hard time.” My sister told me to install a camera in the common area. That was the first good idea anyone had.

I bought one the next morning and set it up aimed at the living room and kitchen while Aaron was supposedly at work.

That night, he asked where I got the camera before I’d even mentioned it.

“I didn’t know you were into surveillance,” he said.

I stared. “How did you know?”

He smiled. “The Wi-Fi blinked.”

He went to bed at ten.

At midnight, the camera sent me its first motion alert.

The clip showed Aaron stepping out of his room wearing nothing but boxer briefs. He walked into the living room, stood directly in front of the camera, and looked up into it for a full minute without blinking.

Then he smiled.

Then the feed cut out.

When I got up the next morning to check the device, the memory card was gone.

Aaron had already left for work.

Or somewhere.

I’m writing this now because I don’t know if I’m being paranoid or if this guy is actually dangerous. There are more details I haven’t even gotten into yet, like the sounds from his room at night, or the fact that he seems to know when I’m about to come home before I text anyone, or how my bedroom door was open this morning when I know for a fact I locked it before bed.

Bryan says I’m spiraling because I hate change.

Maybe he’s right.

But if he is, can somebody explain why Aaron just knocked on my bedroom door and asked me, through the wood, if I still keep the spare key in the blue coffee mug above the fridge?

Because I do.

Or I did.

Chapter 2

[It starts here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/94bkiq/my_craigslist_roommate_is_creeping_me_out/)

---

After work last night, I was greeted at the front door by my fully conscious Craigslist roommate. He was wearing clothes, this time, and leaning against the kitchen counter with my favorite beer already open in his hand. The expression on his face looked almost cheerful.

“*Good call on the camera,*” he said as soon as I stepped inside.

That sentence really did a number on me.

I had spent the entire day at work replaying the broken security clip over and over in my head. Aaron stepping out in boxer briefs. Aaron staring into the lens like he’d known exactly where it was from the start. Aaron somehow removing the memory card without leaving so much as a scratch on the housing. I had talked myself into three separate plans by lunch: confront him immediately, wait until Bryan could come by this weekend, or quietly start packing and abandon the apartment like a coward. None of those plans accounted for him greeting me like we were buddies now that the weirdness had finally become mutual.

I set my bag down slowly. “Where did you get that beer?”

He held up the bottle in a tiny toast. “Your emergency six-pack. Back of the vegetable drawer. Good choice.”

I felt my face go hot.

Again, maybe that doesn’t sound so dramatic in writing. Roommates share stuff. Fridges are communal. But there was something deeply invasive in the way he said it. Not *I found a beer in the fridge.* He gave me the exact location. He wanted me to know he had gone looking.

“I need the camera card back,” I said.

Aaron took a sip. “I threw it out.”

“Why?”

He smiled. “I don’t photograph well at night.”

That should have sent me straight out the door. Instead I stayed and argued because fear makes idiots of us all.

“You had no right to touch my stuff.”

“You had no right to film me in my own home.”

“It's *my* apartment.”

That made him laugh softly. “You keep saying that.”

He walked past me then, close enough that I caught the same cold sterile smell from his jacket I’d noticed the day we met. Not cologne. More like dry cleaner fluid and something medicinal underneath. He disappeared into his room and shut the door. The argument ended there, not because anything got resolved but because I suddenly realized two important facts at once.

One: Bryan had been wrong. I was not spiraling.

Two: I could not spend another night alone in that place with him if I had any choice.

I called Bryan immediately. Straight to voicemail. Melissa texted back that they were at some family dinner in Connecticut and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. I considered a hotel, but between North Jersey rent and my own poor financial planning, “hotel money” is often just fantasy in nicer packaging. So I settled on the next best thing. I dragged the heavy bookshelf from my room in front of the door and slept with a kitchen knife under my pillow like a true suburban lunatic.

At some point, I must have actually passed out despite everything. I know this because I dreamed of my college roommate Nick standing in my bedroom wearing that old Rutgers hoodie Aaron had stolen from my closet. Nick looked pale and exhausted. He pointed at my bedroom wall and kept saying, “You gave him the wrong room.”

I woke up at 3:11 AM to tapping.

Not on the door.

Inside the wall behind my bed.

Three little knocks. Then silence. Then three again.

I grabbed my phone and froze. The sound came from exactly where the headboard met the shared wall between my room and Aaron’s. Tap tap tap. Slow. Deliberate. A pause long enough to hope it was over. Then again.

I whispered his name once. No answer. The tapping continued.

I did not sleep again.

Morning made everything look more manageable, which is one of daylight’s more dangerous tricks. Aaron had already left by the time I emerged. I found the kitchen clean, the beer bottle gone, and one yellow sticky note on the counter in handwriting that was not mine.

*Don’t move the bookshelf. It makes the room look suspicious.*

No signature.

I went to work anyway because what else was I supposed to do? My whole day blurred into a single long panic attack broken up by Excel spreadsheets. Around lunch I finally got Bryan on the phone. To his credit, the second he heard my voice, his tone changed from amused skepticism to actual concern.

“Dude, you sound awful.”

I told him everything. The camera. The beer. The tapping. The note. All of it. He listened, really listened, and then said he’d come by Saturday morning with his cousin, who happened to be a cop in Paramus. They’d talk to Aaron if I wanted. Maybe scare him straight. Maybe help me find legal grounds to throw him out. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to get me through the next few hours.

Then I got home.

The bookshelf was back against the wall where it had originally stood.

My bedroom door was wide open.

I know what some of you are already thinking. Maybe I forgot to lock it. Maybe the shelf wasn’t that heavy. Maybe he just moved it because he wanted to talk. Sure. Fine. Any one of those excuses might work in isolation. But the knife I’d kept under my pillow was now laid neatly in the center of my bed on top of the comforter.

And every drawer in the room had been opened exactly halfway.

Not rummaged through. Not emptied. Just opened with precise, awful symmetry.

I backed out and called the police. Not 911. The non-emergency line, because a part of me was still embarrassed by the whole thing and desperate to sound rational. The responding officer arrived forty minutes later, walked through the apartment, and somehow made the whole situation feel smaller just by existing in it. Aaron, of course, was nowhere to be found.

The officer took my statement, nodded at the knife, glanced at the note, and then asked the question I had been dreading.

“Have you had any issues with anxiety or sleep lately?”

I nearly laughed in his face.

I showed him Aaron’s lease paperwork, the cash deposit, even the email chain from Craigslist. That seemed to help a little. He admitted the note was “strange.” He admitted the room looked “deliberate.” But without a direct threat, without damage, without Aaron present, there wasn’t much he could do besides document the complaint and suggest I spend the night elsewhere.

When I asked if I could break the lease or force Aaron out, he gave me the kind of shrug cops reserve for civil nightmares and haunted nonsense.

Then he left.

So I packed a bag and did exactly what he suggested. I stayed on Bryan and Melissa’s couch in Hoboken last night. Melissa gave me tea and one of those blankets that feels like a hug from a wealthy aunt. Bryan kept pretending none of this scared him and then accidentally checked the deadbolt three times while we watched TV. Their apartment felt insanely, painfully normal.

This morning we all went back to mine.

Aaron’s room was empty.

Not just unoccupied. Empty. No suitcase. No boxes labeled with dates. No gray comforter. No clothes in the closet. No toiletries in the bathroom. Even the little dent his bedframe had left in the carpet seemed less visible than I remembered. It was like he had never actually moved in.

The lease paperwork was gone too.

So was the Craigslist email thread from my inbox.

So was the bank deposit from the cash security payment, according to my account activity.

Bryan looked at me in a way best friends generally try very hard not to. Half concern, half calculation.

Melissa found the first real proof about an hour later.

She was cleaning up because that’s what Melissa does when confronted with any crisis, and she noticed a section of wallpaper inside Aaron’s closet lifting at the seam. Behind it was a hole in the drywall, maybe eighteen inches high and a foot wide, cut cleanly between the studs. Not a repair job. A passage.

It opened into the dead space behind my bedroom wall.

Big enough for a man to crawl through.

There was one thing inside.

A stack of Polaroids.

All of me.

Sleeping.

Different nights. Different angles. Some clearly taken from inside my room. Some so close I could see my own eyelashes in the camera flash.

The earliest photo had to be at least a week old.

Bryan called his cousin right after that. He’s on his way over now, and I’m sitting in Melissa’s car while I type this because I physically cannot be inside that apartment anymore.

There’s one more thing I should mention.

The last Polaroid in the stack wasn’t of me asleep.

It was taken this morning.

I’m in Bryan and Melissa’s apartment, passed out on their couch under the wealthy-aunt blanket.

And in the bottom right corner of the frame, reflected in their TV screen, Aaron is standing in the kitchen watching me.

Chapter 3

[One](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/94bkiq/my_craigslist_roommate_is_creeping_me_out/) and [two.](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/94ndzj/my_craigslist_roommate_is_creeping_me_out_update/)

-----

When I signed off on Saturday night, Bryan’s cousin was still on his way over and I was doing my best not to throw up in the passenger seat of Melissa’s car. Things moved very quickly after that.

The cousin’s name is Pete. He’s not some movie-cop hero, just a tired Bergen County patrol officer in his late thirties with permanent five-o’clock shadow and the kind of face that says he’s had this exact conversation with too many people in worse neighborhoods. He met us outside my building and listened to the whole story while keeping one eye on the street and the other on me like he was trying to decide whether I was in danger or just deeply unstable.

That changed once he saw the crawlspace and the Polaroids.

“Jesus,” was all he said at first.

The photos bought me credibility I frankly needed. Pete bagged them as carefully as he could without official kit, took pictures of the hole in the closet, and then did a proper sweep of the apartment with his hand on his service weapon. He found no Aaron. No hidden bags. No IDs. No fingerprints we could meaningfully isolate because, as he reminded us, it was my apartment and basically everything already had my prints or Bryan’s or some previous contractor’s all over it.

But he did find one thing the rest of us had missed.

Under the sink in Aaron’s bathroom cabinet sat a little plastic motel sewing kit. Inside, instead of needles and thread, was my missing security camera memory card.

Pete handed it to me with a look that said *don’t get your hopes up.*

Most people who steal camera cards wipe them. Most people, however, are not whatever Aaron was. He had removed my first clip but left the rest intact. We loaded the card into Bryan’s laptop right there at the kitchen table while Pete stood watch by the front door.

The first few videos showed exactly what you’d expect: empty living room, me eating cereal, me coming home from work, Aaron moving through the apartment in his usual unnerving way. Quiet. Deliberate. Too aware of the lens. He never looked directly at it again after that first clip, but he always seemed to know where it was.

Then we got to the file from Thursday night.

At 1:14 AM, Aaron stepped out of his room in boxer briefs and walked into the living room. Same as before. He stopped under the camera and stood still for a while. Then he turned toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms and just… looked.

The angle didn’t show my room directly. But it did show my door.

We watched that door open from the inside.

I stepped out barefoot and sleepy, moving like a person not fully conscious. I had absolutely no memory of this. Not even a scrap. Camera-me crossed the hall, stood beside Aaron for a moment, and then followed him into his bedroom.

Nobody in the kitchen said a word while the clip played.

At 1:22 AM, the two of us emerged again. Aaron went to the living room. I returned to my room, shut the door, and never came back out.

At 1:27 AM, Aaron walked over to the camera, reached up, and removed the card.

That would have been bad enough. It gets worse.

The next saved clip had been recorded by accident, or automatically, after he replaced the card. Timestamped 4:03 AM. Dark apartment. Living room empty. Then Aaron’s bedroom door opened. He stepped out wearing my college hoodie. Behind him came me.

Still asleep. Eyes open.

I know how stupid that sounds. But the footage was clear enough. I shuffled behind him in my boxers with both eyes open and utterly lifeless. Aaron led me by one wrist into the kitchen and positioned me in front of the sink. Then he spoke. No audio on the camera, but I could read enough of his lips to catch the phrase.

*Look at yourself.*

Sleeping-me stood there for maybe twenty seconds, staring at my own reflection in the black window above the sink while Aaron leaned close behind and watched my face with total fascination. Then he guided me back down the hall, tucked me into bed like a child, and shut the door.

Pete replayed the clip three times before he swore and snapped the laptop shut.

“Okay,” he said. “Now we’re past weird roommate. Now we’re in criminally weird.”

That was the first encouraging thing anybody had said since this started.

Pete called it in for real after that. Not the lazy patrol version. Actual detectives. Actual report. Actual concern. We spent the rest of Saturday giving statements and waiting around my apartment while two plainclothes guys from Hudson County tore through the place. They dusted, photographed, collected the note, the photos, the memory card. They even sent someone into the crawlspace, who came back out cursing with insulation in his hair and not much else. Aaron had kept his footprint light by design.

The detectives asked whether he had any real name, employment paperwork, social media, prior address, family, ex-girlfriend, anything. I had Craigslist emails and some cash. That was basically it. The finance job turned out fake. The phone number he used had been a disposable app number. The ID he showed me the night we met? Not in any drawer, not in any photo, not in any surviving email. Looking back, I realize I never held it. He had flashed it from his hand and I had accepted the gesture because I wanted the rent problem solved more than I wanted to think.

By evening, the police left with promises to follow up and a whole lot of nothing actionable. Pete stayed longer. He wanted me out of the apartment immediately. Bryan agreed. Melissa didn’t even let the idea hit the table. We packed what mattered and drove back to Hoboken before dark.

I wish I could tell you that should have been the end. Creepy fake roommate, hidden crawlspace, police report, everybody goes home feeling violated but alive. Instead, Saturday night became the part I still wake up sweating over.

Bryan and Melissa had me set up on the couch again with every lamp in the place on and Pete’s spare service flashlight sitting on the coffee table. We triple-checked the windows. Bryan wedged a chair under the front doorknob because apparently my life had turned all of us into panicky pioneers. Nobody drank much. Nobody said the word “sleepwalking.” Around midnight Pete finally headed home, promising he’d circle back in the morning.

At 2:06 AM the fire alarm in the building went off.

Every unit. Full screaming system. The sort of shrill impossible noise that yanks your spine straight before your brain even catches up. Bryan came flying out of the bedroom in gym shorts. Melissa grabbed her purse and shoes. I froze for one second too long because a stupid part of me assumed *Aaron.* That somehow he had pulled the building alarm from outside just to make me move.

We took the stairs with everyone else. Three floors of pajamas, curses, old ladies, and one guy carrying a cat like a football. Outside, rain had just started. The whole block glowed red from the alarms. Fire trucks were already on the way in the distance.

Then I saw him.

Aaron stood across the street under the awning of a closed deli with his hands in the pockets of that navy jacket. No umbrella. No panic. Just watching the building empty. Watching *me*.

I shouted before I really knew I was going to. Bryan turned, saw the direction of my finger, and took off without asking questions. I ran after him. Melissa screamed at both of us to stop. Aaron smiled once and slipped into the alley beside the deli.

We should have let him go. Two office idiots in wet socks had no business pursuing a stalker into a Jersey alley at two in the morning. But rage makes poor tactical decisions look noble. Bryan caught up to me by the dumpsters halfway down the alley. Aaron waited at the far end by a chain-link fence, perfectly calm.

“Who the hell are you?” Bryan shouted.

Aaron looked only at me.

“*You gave me the room,*” he said.

Same line from my dream. Same impossible cold little certainty.

I actually took a step toward him. “What room?”

He tilted his head. “*The one behind your sleep.*”

Then the fire escape above us rattled.

Something dropped from the second floor landing and hit Bryan hard enough to put him on one knee. I thought it was another person until it stood. Same height as Aaron. Same jacket. Same face.

For one sick second there were two of him in the alley.

Bryan started screaming. Not words. Just raw panic. I stumbled backward, slipped in the rain, and cracked my shoulder against the dumpster. By the time I looked up again, both Aarons were moving toward us in perfect step.

The first fire truck hit the corner then, lights sweeping across the mouth of the alley. That saved us. Both figures jerked at the light like roaches catching sun. One vaulted the fence in a motion no human body should manage from standing. The other sprinted straight up the brick wall using the fire escape supports like ladder rungs and vanished onto a roof.

I know how that sounds. I know.

The responding firefighters found us soaked and babbling beside the dumpsters. The alarm turned out to be false. Pulled manually from a box in the rear stairwell. No prints. No witnesses. Just another little nudge from whatever game Aaron thought we were playing.

Bryan refuses to talk about the second man. He insists the rain and lights and adrenaline did something to perception. Maybe he's right. Maybe one impossible roommate is easier to live with than duplicates.

Sunday morning Pete came back with bad news and worse questions. The detectives had run the Polaroids. The paper stock was current, but the image chemistry on the oldest ones dated back at least seven years based on brand and batch. The earliest sleeping photo of me could not possibly have been taken last week.

I only moved into that apartment four years ago.

So either Aaron had been collecting me before he ever met me, or he didn’t actually meet me through Craigslist at all.

I’m staying with my sister now. Different town. Different county. The police recommended I do not go anywhere alone until they sort this out, which means they have absolutely no idea how to sort this out. Pete was honest enough to admit that much.

There is one final detail and then I’m done. An hour ago, while unpacking the bag I grabbed from my apartment, I found something in the side pocket I know was not there before.

A folded rental listing torn from a newspaper.

My current address circled in black ink.

And underneath it, in Aaron’s handwriting:

*Still looking for the right room.*