Georgia Englewood

Georgia Englewood

Window

I couldn’t believe it at first. I guess maybe that’s denial, and a lot of people go through that stage. It’s typical, expected even. But it’s not even just that I couldn’t believe she was gone. It was how it happened.

We lived in a good neighborhood. Yeah, sure bad things happen everywhere, but you still expect some neighborhoods to be less likely targets and have better security systems. Our apartment actually still had the control pad for an old system, but it wasn’t active when we moved in. And we never felt the need, or had the money, to add a new one. The door locked, and the windows locked, and that was all any place I’d ever lived in really had. I guess some larger buildings have a secured front door, but for a small building, yeah. Our unit had a front door to the outside, which I always saw as a good thing. And it did latch and lock. Except that one time it literally opened on its own. I guess it didn’t latch or somehow became unlatched on its own. Thank God she was home then. Or that door could have been open for hours. The cats would’ve bolted. God only knows.

But I was mostly shocked because she was so obsessively, annoyingly careful. She’d notice if I forgot to lock the door. One time she got a bad vibe from an Uber driver, so she asked him to take her to the restaurant next to our building at the time, and went in and got food in case he was watching. She called me to ask what I wanted and to tell me she thought the driver might have been touching himself with her in the backseat. But he was probably just tapping his leg or something, and she was probably just being paranoid. She definitely watched too much true crime Bailey Sarian nonsense.

But despite double-checking the front door and making sure we shut and locked the living room window every single time we left the house, even if it was only for a short period of time, even though the cats loved having the window open, it happened. Basically what she was trying to avoid the whole time, all she did was effectively delay it, I guess. She didn’t realize the bedroom window was unlocked. It was shut, but not locked. I guess I didn’t realize either. I’ll never know who shut the window last. It was probably her, and she probably just forgot to lock it, and the blinds were down, so you couldn’t see from the inside that it was unlocked. But you could see from the outside.

It doesn’t matter. Somebody saw an opportunity. And it doesn’t seem like it was a burglary either because nothing was taken. Not that we had anything of value to take anyway. Laptop was in plain sight, left. Anyway. They’re not entirely sure what happened. The homicide detectives. It looks like she was not aware of anything amiss until the actual struggle, so it seems like the guy came in through the window when nobody was home, shut it behind him, and hid

somewhere until he felt like taking the next step. He could have been there for hours, in a closet or something.

How often do you check your closets?