It placed a used tea bag on my balcony.
Then the person stepped backward.
For the first time, we could see part of their face.
Evan froze.
I looked at him.
“Who is that?”
He didn’t answer.
His eyes were fixed on the screen.
Finally, he whispered:
“My landlord.”
I felt the room tilt.
But then the video continued.
The man turned toward the camera.
And he wasn’t alone.
Someone else stepped into the frame.
A woman.
I recognized her immediately.
My heart stopped.
It was the woman who had lived in apartment 2A.
The woman who had moved out six months earlier.
The woman who, according to the landlord, had supposedly left the building because she had “found a better place.”
Evan looked at me.
“There were two people doing it.”
I stared at the screen.
Then I noticed something neither of us had seen before.
The woman was holding an envelope.
She handed it to the landlord.
He opened it.
Inside was a photograph.
They both looked at it.
Then the landlord said something that made my blood run cold.
“Once she finds the basement door, we won’t have to worry about her anymore.”
I looked at Evan.
“What basement door?”
He went completely silent.
Then he whispered:
“You don’t have a basement door.”
“What?”
He pointed toward my balcony.
“No.”
Then he looked at the wall separating our apartments.
“There is a hidden door.”
We searched the wall behind my kitchen cabinets.
And eventually, we found it.
A narrow wooden panel.
Behind it was a staircase leading downward.
My apartment building had a hidden basement room I had never known existed.
And inside that room was something far more disturbing than cameras.
There were dozens of boxes.
Each one had a tenant’s name written on it.
My name was on the newest box.
Evan opened it.
Inside were photographs, copies of my mail, spare keys, and pages documenting my daily routine.
At the very bottom was a folder marked with one word:
TRANSFER.
Inside was a property document.
My apartment.
And beneath my name was a signature.
A signature I had never written.
Someone had been preparing to steal my apartment.
The tea bags weren’t meant to annoy me.
They were meant to scare me.
To make me complain.
To make me look unstable.
To make the landlord eventually claim I was causing problems and needed to leave.
Evan stared at the documents.
Then he looked at me.
“There was only one thing they didn’t know.”
“What?”
He pointed at the final page.
“This building isn’t owned by the landlord.”
I frowned.
“Then who owns it?”
Evan slowly turned the page.
My name was there.
Not as a tenant.
As the owner.
I had inherited the building from my grandmother years earlier.
I had completely forgotten about the old property company because the management company handled everything.
The landlord wasn’t my landlord.
He was my employee.
And he’d been secretly trying to steal the building from me.
The tea bags stopped the next morning.
So did the cameras.
The police eventually uncovered enough evidence to explain everything.
But I still keep one of those tea bags.
Not because I’m sentimental.
Because every time I look at it, I remember something important:
Sometimes the smallest annoyance isn’t really an annoyance.
Sometimes it’s a warning.
And sometimes the person you’re arguing with isn’t the person you need to fear.
