Chapter 2

Without waiting for her to finish, I shoved the plastic bag straight into her hands and turned on my heel up the stairs.

She called after me twice, but I never looked back.

Back inside my place, I shut the door and stood in the entryway for a moment.

Without turning on the living room lights, I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, sat down on the sofa, and took slow sips.

I bought that parking spot last year.

The first time Brenda asked to borrow it was early this spring.

I had just gotten home from work and saw a white SUV parked in my spot. Just as I was about to call the property management office, Brenda came running out of her unit, still wearing an apron with flour smudged on her hands. She claimed a pipe burst in her place and the repair guy needed a quick spot to park.

Thinking we were neighbors, I agreed without a second thought.

After that, it became "borrowing it once in a while."

Then, it turned into "borrowing it all the time."

I first noticed something was off about three months ago.

Every time I got back from a business trip, a different car was parked in my space.

Sometimes it had out-of-state plates; sometimes it had local plates, but cars I'd never seen before in my life.

Whenever I called her to move the car, she always answered eagerly, promising she was "on it right away." But each time, it took longer and longer for the car to actually leave.

The worst time, I waited forty minutes outside, freezing in the evening wind near the entrance gate.

I tried addressing it with her.

Last month, I had a three-day conference out of town. The day before returning, I texted her saying I'd be back the day after tomorrow and asked her to clear the spot in advance.

She texted back: Sounds good!

Yet when I pulled up two days later, a commercial van with out-of-state plates was parked squarely in my spot.

I called her, and she claimed it belonged to her brother-in-law and that he'd move it right away.

That "right away" left me sitting in my car for half an hour. When I couldn't take it anymore, I called three more times. She finally picked up on the fifth call, claiming her brother-in-law was in the shower and asking for another ten minutes.

It was past nine at night. My eyes were burning with exhaustion. In the end, I had to park across the street in a commercial parking garage, which cost me sixty bucks for the night.

I thought about putting a lock on the spot.

I had even added one of those heavy-duty ground locks to my Amazon cart. I looked at it over and over, but never hit "Place Order."

I kept worrying it would burn bridges. After all, we lived across the hall from each other; making things ugly would make daily life miserable.

Besides, Brenda was always smiling whenever we ran into each other, and she regularly sent holiday greetings in the building's SnapChat group. I just couldn't bring myself to be that confrontational.

Until two days ago.

What I saw on the surveillance footage kept me glued to my seat in the building management office for a long, long time.

That day, I returned early from a business trip without telling anyone.

I arrived at the complex at two in the afternoon, only to find a black sedan sitting in my spot.

Instead of calling Brenda, I walked straight to the management office and asked to review the parking lot surveillance footage from the past week.

The girl at the desk recognized me and pulled up the recordings.

The video was crystal clear. Whenever I was away on a business trip:

Every morning around eight or nine, Brenda would guide a stranger to my parking spot, point around, exchange a few words, and watch as the driver scanned her PayPal code to pay.

Then, she would walk away smiling, and the stranger would pull into my spot.

Sometimes they stayed for half a day, sometimes all day, leaving toward evening.

Sitting in front of the monitors, I counted. Over the five days I was out of town, she had rented my spot to at least eight different cars.

She was never borrowing it. She had been running a business all along.