3 days after I told my roommate I was pregnant, she stood in our kitchen with both hands wrapped around a coffee mug and told me I owed her several thousand dollars for ruining her life.
Chapter 2
The next morning, I sent Claire a short text.
“I’m confirming that I intend to remain in the apartment through June 30, the end of our lease. I won’t ask you for pregnancy-related assistance. If you prefer to move earlier, you’re free to discuss your options with the landlord.”
She responded with a thumbs-up emoji.
Nothing else.
The friendship ended in that little yellow hand.
After that, our apartment became a place where two people lived without living together. Claire stopped speaking to me unless absolutely necessary. I stopped using the living room. I ate microwaved meals in my bedroom and kept crackers beside my bed for the mornings when nausea hit before sunrise.
Then the small cruelties began.
Claire invited people over almost every weekend, including Denise Harper, a former friend of mine with whom I had experienced an ugly falling-out years earlier. Denise had never visited our apartment before. Suddenly she was there constantly.
Claire also removed photographs of the two of us from the shelves and replaced them with pictures of herself and Denise.
I tried not to care.
I failed.
One evening, after walking past the fourth framed picture of Denise smiling from Claire’s birthday dinner, I carried my microwave and toaster into my bedroom. Both appliances belonged to me. It was childish, and I knew it was childish, but apparently pregnancy had not elevated me to sainthood.
The next afternoon, I taped one ultrasound picture to the refrigerator.
I lasted two days before guilt got the better of me and I took it down.
My mother, Carol, came by one Saturday carrying enough groceries to feed a family of six. She had always believed food could repair almost anything. Broken heart? Meatloaf. Job trouble? Chicken pot pie. Unexpected pregnancy and a hostile roommate? Three casseroles and a bag of blueberry muffins.
We stayed in my bedroom.
“You pay half the rent here?” Mom asked, looking around at the crowded space.
“Yes.”
“And you’re hiding in one room?”
“For three more months.”
She shook her head. “I raised you to be considerate, not invisible.”
“I’m trying not to escalate things.”
“There’s a difference.”
My mother was sixty-four and had spent thirty-five years as an elementary school teacher. She could detect bullying at twenty paces and nonsense from across a football field.
Still, I kept my head down.
Then, on May 8, I came home from work and found half the apartment gone.
Claire had moved out without telling me.
The couch remained, but the television was gone. Her cookware was gone. The framed photographs were gone. Jasper’s bed, his food dishes, his collection of shredded tennis balls—all gone.
So were several things that belonged to me.
A floor lamp. A set of glass storage containers. Two decorative baskets. A small bookshelf from the hallway.
Her half of the refrigerator, however, remained completely full.
Three days later, the smell started.
When I opened one container, I nearly threw up onto the floor. Claire had left meat, old produce, milk, and takeout containers behind to rot. Her bedroom had trash scattered across the carpet, holes in the walls from mounted shelves, and deep chew marks along the bottom of one cabinet where Jasper had gnawed the wood.
I texted her about the missing property, her share of the utilities, and the couch.
We had purchased the couch together, but I had paid for it and she had agreed in writing to reimburse half. She never had.
Her response came twenty minutes later.
“I will not be paying you anything after the way you bullied me out of my home.”
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
I had spoken to her once in more than a month.
She continued.
“You created a hostile environment and made my friends uncomfortable coming over. I was forced to leave.”
I laughed aloud, but there was nothing funny about it.
For the first time, I became genuinely frightened of her.
Not physically frightened exactly. Claire had never threatened violence. But there is a particular kind of fear that comes from realizing someone else has constructed an entirely different version of reality and placed you inside it as the villain.
You cannot reason your way out of a story another person needs to believe.
I decided the missing money was the price of freedom.
By June, I was showing slightly, though loose blouses hid most of it. My pregnancy was progressing normally. Ryan visited whenever he could, my parents checked on me constantly, and the apartment felt peaceful for the first time in months.
An old friend named Ben had previously arranged to stay with us intermittently during June. He was completing a physician assistant clinical rotation nearby, and when Claire still lived there, she had agreed he could stay.
After Claire moved out, I put an air mattress and small desk in her empty bedroom. It gave Ben more privacy than the guest room near the kitchen, and I appreciated having another human being around.
I did not charge him anything.
Two weeks before the lease ended, I was at work when my phone buzzed.
It was Ben.
“Call me when you can,” he wrote. “Something weird just happened.”
I stepped into the hallway outside my office and called immediately.
“What happened?”
“Claire came in.”
My body went cold.
“What do you mean, came in?”
“She unlocked the door. Her dad was with her.”
“With a key?”
“Yeah.”
Claire had moved out more than a month earlier but still technically remained on the lease through June. Apparently she had kept a spare key.
“What did she want?”
“She said they were here to patch holes in the wall.”
“Did they?”
“No. They looked around for a couple minutes and left.”
I closed my eyes.
“Ben, did she say anything about you?”
There was a pause.
“She asked why I was sleeping in her room.”
That evening, an email from our landlord arrived.
Claire had accused me of illegally subletting the apartment.
