Sweet Little Pains

14

The rest of the week went by in monotony for Clare. She woke up, performed her daily rituals ten headed down to the café to work.

On Tuesday her children surprised her with a visit, which was thankfully just before closing, to her relief and to the delighted bliss of the girls. She got no word from their father or from his best friend, which was great. 

She also was nowhere near figuring out who was stalking her.

Part of her had considered going to the police, but she didn’t. Sixteen years spent in prison gave her a different perspective of the justice system. It was pure shit. 

She was an ex-con just straight out of the prison. Chances were they’d take one look at her, assume whatever they wanted to and then mumbled something about ‘investigating’ it. 

Besides, whoever had sent her those messages hadn’t caused any physical harm to her, besides saying they would ‘make sure she would regret it’.

He had invaded her privacy, however – a careful search of her entire apartment on Sunday had revealed  six strategically hidden cameras in different corners of her home. 

The sight of those cameras had enraged her immensely. She hated the thought that every action she had taken, every intimate activity she had done had been inspected and dissected by some creep who fancied themselves to be God.

 It reminded her of the basic lack of freedom in prison, and she hated it. She hated that she had been watched without her consent, without her knowledge. That alone was enough to make her want to inflict violence on whoever it was that had dared to spy on her.

She had changed the locks of her home the day after she found the cameras. They would have had to get into her apartment in order to install those cameras. That meant they had a copy of her keys, or some other way of entering her apartment. 

After that, she had done a thorough sweep of her apartment, searching for any other way besides the door that a person could use to enter the house. The search had proved futile. Besides the door, there was no other entrance into the house. 

The discovery didn’t assure her in anyway. In fact, Clare would have preferred there being some opening in the wall or roof. Something else other than the door. 

Because that meant that the door had been accessed by a person who possessed a key, or at least had gotten close enough to swap the key for a mold. And there were only four people who had a copy of her key. The manager of the café, the owner and her children. 

Clare was sure she could rule out her children and maybe Simon, but she couldn’t rule out Eustace. She hardly knew the man – friendly greetings now and a short chat here and there hardly counted. It disturbed her that he may have done something this disgusting.  

It may not be him, she reminded herself as she took out clothes from the wash. Someone could have made a mold of the key – it was just lying in his office in a drawer, after all. 

But that meant someone would have either gotten casual access to his office – say an employee – or that someone had come to the café in the middle of the night, picked the lock and helped themselves to the key.

Or her door could have been picked in the first place.

The thought made her even more uneasy. First thing tomorrow, she was going to get a dead bolt installed herself. It wasn’t an easy feeling, knowing that a person could just pick her lock and just slip into her home, just like that.

She squeezed out the residual water from the rinsed clothes, spreading them on the line on the small balcony to the side. The balcony was burglary proofed all over, so it couldn’t have been an entry point, but she had checked nonetheless.