The Wrong Door

Chapter 1: The Neighbour

Nora Vael had lived in Apartment 4B for two years without once thinking about the man in 4C.

He was quiet. That was the thing about him the only thing, really. In a building full of noise the couple in 3A who argued about everything, the student below who played bass guitar at midnight, the pipes that knocked and groaned like the building was dreaming the man in 4C produced nothing. No footsteps. No television. No sound of cooking or running water or the small domestic percussion of a person simply existing behind a wall.

She had seen him twice. Once in the corridor tall, pale, a grey coat, a nod and once at the letterboxes downstairs, where he had collected his post without looking at it and gone back upstairs without acknowledging her at all. She had not learned his name. She had not needed to.

Until the night she found his door open.

It was a Tuesday, 11 p.m. She was coming back from a late shift at the hospital where she worked as a radiographer, still in her scrubs, keys in hand, thinking about nothing more complicated than whether she had the energy to cook or whether cereal was a socially acceptable dinner for a thirty-four-year-old woman.

The door to 4C was open four inches. Not wide not the open door of someone who had just stepped out. The careful, deliberate open of something left ajar on purpose, or forced.

She stopped. Looked at it. Looked up and down the empty corridor.

There was no sound from inside. No light either, except a faint grey from what might have been a window left uncurtained. And on the floor, just visible through the gap, a hand. Palm up. Still.

Nora was a practical woman. She had worked in hospitals for a decade and had seen things that reorganised your understanding of what the body could and couldn’t withstand. She was not someone who froze.

She pushed the door open with her foot, phone already in hand, thumb over the emergency dial.

The man from 4C was on the floor of his own hallway, unconscious but breathing she could see that from the doorway with a cut above his eyebrow and the particular stillness of someone who had not chosen to lie down.

She went in. She checked his pulse, his breathing, the wound on his head. Concussion, probably. Nothing immediately life-threatening. She called an ambulance and crouched beside him and that was when she saw, on the floor beside his outstretched hand, a photograph.

Of her. Taken from outside. Through the window of the café she went to every Saturday morning, three streets away.

She picked it up. Turned it over. On the back, in handwriting she didn’t recognise: She doesn’t know yet.

The ambulance took nine minutes. In those nine minutes Nora sat very still on the floor of a stranger’s apartment holding a photograph of herself and understood, with the cold clarity of someone whose mind worked best under pressure, that her life had just divided into before and after.