The Observer!

I’ve been watching her for three months. Same drill, day after day: coffee at 7:15, newspaper spread out on her kitchen table, red pen circling job listings. She has been out of work since the layoffs. I know because I’ve examined the envelopes in her mailbox unemployment checks, past-due notices, a missive from her mother in Tallahassee who doesn’t understand why she won’t just return home.

This morning she’s wearing the blue sweater again. Third time this week. These days her closet is more utilitarian. I’ve itemized them all, I know what are favoured, what are saved for interviews. And there haven’t been too many of those of late.

From my spot across the way, I can tell when she cries. Always at night, always after she’s called her ex. They speak in one-sided conversations him talking, her listening, shoulders slowly sagging. I have never actually heard her voice, but I know its fault lines.

She has a tiny scar above her right eyebrow. Only visible if the light is just so. I’ve built elaborate back stories for that scar childhood accident, jealous lover, self-immolating moment of despair. My guess is that the truth is pretty dull, but imagination can fill in the cracks that observation does not allow to happen.

Today something's different. She’s packing a suitcase, methodically choosing things I recognize — the black dress from the interview two weeks ago, the earrings she wore last Sunday, her one pair of heels. The movements are exact, choreographed. She's been planning this.

Now I should care about her leaving? Disappointment, perhaps. Loss. Instead, there is only the dispassionate eye of a scientist whose subject matter is changing environments. I’ll adjust my study accordingly.

When she leaves the apartment, suitcase trailing behind her, she doesn’t lock the door. Interesting. Implying transience, or maybe lack of concern for what she disrupts.

I wait half an hour after she leaves. Protocol. Then cross the street, trying the doorknob. It shifts freely under my hand.

Her apartment smells of her — lavender and coffee and something distinctly human. The coffee cup remains in the sink. Hiring ads still faded from my screen in furious red. But there’s something on the table I hadn’t noticed from the window — a sealed envelope with a name scrawled across it.

"My name."

"Impossible. I've been careful. Professional. Undetectable."

The letter is short. Just three sentences:

"I’ve been watching you watching me.” You're getting sloppy, agent. My turn now."

My heart racing, I glance up from the paper to the mirror on her wall. The face staring back up at me isn’t my own. It’s younger, female, and has a small scar over its right eyebrow.

I bring my hand to my face, feel the alien smoothness of skin that doesn’t belong to me, the raised line of a scar that should not be there.

In the mirror she smiles with my mouth and I realize I’m not watching.

"I'm the observed."

My pulse raced as I looked up from the page to the mirror on the wall. The visage looking back at me is not my own. The character is youthful, feminine, and has a little scar on its right brow.