Chapter 3: What She Said Next
"You have no idea what you've just done."
That was it.
That was what Eloise said.
Not sorry.
Not embarrassed.
Not even angry in the way someone is when they've been caught doing something wrong.
Her voice was low and flat, and her eyes had gone somewhere cold that I hadn't seen in them before.
Her friends were already moving toward the gate.
One of them — a younger woman in a yellow swimsuit — touched Eloise's arm.
"Come on.
Let's just go."
Eloise shook her off.
She didn't move.
"You called my landlord," she said.
"Do you understand what that means for me?"
"I understand that you used my property without permission for six weeks," I said.
"That's what I understand."
"I have three kids." Her voice didn't waver.
"I have three kids and a lease that's already month-to-month because I was late twice last year.
One complaint from a neighbor and Gerald will use it as the excuse he's been looking for."
I didn't say anything.
"You didn't think about that, did you?" she said.
"You just wanted your little lesson."
My husband, Dan, had come outside by then.
He stood a few steps behind me.
I heard him exhale slowly.
"Eloise," he said, "we asked you to stop.
We asked you more than once."
"I know." For just a second, something shifted in her face.
"I know you did."
She looked at the pool.
Then at the gate her friends had already walked through.
"Gerald called me twenty minutes ago," she said.
"Right before I came over.
He said he'd received a complaint and that he'd be reviewing my lease situation." She paused.
"He used those exact words.
Reviewing my lease situation."
I felt something move in my chest.
Not guilt exactly.
Something more complicated.
"I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me," Eloise said.
"I know I was wrong.
I knew it every time I came over here." She looked at me directly.
"But I need you to call Gerald back and tell him it was a misunderstanding.
Please."
The word please landed differently than I expected.
Dan put his hand on my shoulder.
Not pushing me either way.
Just there.
"Why didn't you just ask?" I said.
"Any one of those times — why didn't you just knock on the door and ask?"
Eloise opened her mouth.
Closed it.
"Because I was embarrassed," she said finally.
"Because I didn't want you to know how bad things have gotten."
The four of us stood there in the afternoon heat, the pool water perfectly still behind her.
I thought about the footage on my phone.
Six weeks of it.
The cups, the wrappers, the towels left in piles.
The calls she'd brushed off like I was the unreasonable one.
I thought about my kids, who had come home from that week away to find their furniture moved and someone else's sunscreen on the table.
"I need to think about it," I said.
Eloise nodded once.
She walked to the gate, stopped with her hand on the latch, and turned back.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I never let anyone go inside the house.
I made sure of that."
She left.
The gate clicked shut behind her.
Dan and I stood there for a long moment without speaking.
"Do you believe her?" he said.
"About the kids?"
"I don't know," I said.
"I looked her up after the second time she came over when we were away.
She does have three kids.
I've seen them."
"That's not the same as the rest of it being true."
"No," I said.
"It's not."
I looked down at my phone.
Gerald's number wasn't in my contacts.
I'd found it through the property management company's website when I'd made the call that morning.
It had taken me four days to decide to do it.
"What are you going to do?" Dan asked.
I didn't answer right away.
Because standing there, I realized that what Eloise had said wasn't the thing that was bothering me most.
It was the thing she hadn't said.
She'd told me she was embarrassed.
She'd told me things had gotten bad.
She'd told me she knew she was wrong every single time.
But she hadn't told me why she kept coming back anyway.
And something about the way she'd said *you have no idea what you've just done* — not angry, not dramatic, just flat and certain — made me feel like the answer to that question was something I actually needed to know.
I went inside and opened my laptop.
May you like
I typed her name into the search bar.
What came up stopped me cold.
