The Tenant Below

THE TENANT BELOW

Priya Malhotra had looked at eleven apartments in three weeks before she found the one on Delancey, and by the time she saw it she’d stopped expecting anything to feel right. The eleventh one had mold behind the fridge the landlord swore was “just condensation.” The ninth had a broken buzzer and a super who wouldn’t return calls. The one before that was fine, actually fine, until she saw the rent and did the math twice to make sure she wasn’t reading it wrong.

The Delancey place was seven hundred less than anything else she’d seen in the neighborhood, and when she asked why, the landlord, a thin, courteous man named Mr. Aldric, told her the building was old and the owners preferred long-term tenants to flashy ones, and that was apparently that. He had a way of answering questions that left her satisfied in the moment and unsatisfied ten minutes later, once she’d had time to notice the answer hadn’t actually explained anything.

“You’ll want to move in quickly if you’re taking it,” he said, walking her through the narrow galley kitchen, the bedroom with its one deep-set window facing the airshaft. “The unit doesn’t like sitting empty long.”

She laughed, because it seemed like the kind of thing a person said as a joke about squatters or pipes freezing. He didn’t laugh with her. He just smiled, thin and polite, and handed her the lease.

She signed it that afternoon. She moved in three days later, on a Thursday, with two friends, a rented van, and a headache from carrying a dresser up four flights of narrow stairs that turned at angles no dresser should have to survive.

By ten that night her friends had gone home and Priya was alone in the apartment for the first time, surrounded by boxes she was too tired to open, sitting on the floor with a glass of wine because she hadn’t found the box with actual glasses yet. The apartment was quiet in the specific way new apartments are quiet, a silence that hadn’t decided yet whether it belonged to her.

She went to shower before bed, mostly to feel like a person again, and that was when she noticed the bathroom mirror sat slightly crooked on its mount, tilted just enough that she had to angle her head to see her whole face in it. She reached up to straighten it and felt it shift loose in her hand entirely, the backing coming away from the wall with a soft, dry sound like old tape giving up.

There was a gap behind it. Not a medicine cabinet, just a shallow recess in the plaster, the kind of space that probably used to hold a pipe junction before someone tiled over it. And in that gap, wedged flat against the wall, was a bundle of postcards, tied with a length of kitchen string gone brittle and yellow.

She almost didn’t touch them. She thought, briefly, about calling Mr. Aldric, asking if the last tenant had left something behind, letting it become his problem instead of hers. But she was twenty-eight years old and lived alone and had never once in her life managed to leave a mystery unopened, and so she sat down on the closed toilet lid with the mirror still hanging loose beside her, and untied the string.

The postcards were plain, the kind you buy in a drugstore, blank on the picture side, no stamps, no postmarks, like they’d never actually gone through the mail at all. They’d just been written and kept. Dozens of them. The handwriting was small and slanted and rushed in some places, careful in others, the way handwriting looks when someone’s mood changed mid-sentence.

She turned the first one over.

Moved in today. Aldric’s strange but harmless, I think. Kitchen’s smaller than the photos made it look.

Her stomach did something small and cold, because that was, almost word for word, what she’d said to her friend Deja on the phone three hours earlier, standing in this exact kitchen.

Everyone said something like that on move-in day, more or less. Half the internet had probably posted the same sentence about some other kitchen in some other city. She flipped to the next card.

Found a stray cat outside the building, gray with one white paw. Fed it the rest of my sandwich. Aldric says don’t, that it isn’t really a stray, that it belongs to the building the way the pipes do. Strange thing to say about a cat.

Priya set the card down slowly and stood up, because she had, in fact, seen a gray cat with one white paw sitting on the stoop when she’d carried the last box in, and she had, in fact, fed it half a sandwich, and Mr. Aldric had said almost exactly those words to her when she mentioned it, laughing a little, like it was a strange old habit of his rather than a strange thing to actually believe.

She went through the rest of the stack faster than she meant to, standing now, one hand braced against the sink. Most of them were small, mundane things. A leaking faucet fixed on a Tuesday. A neighbor’s dog barking through the wall at two in the morning. A missed call from a mother that the writer felt guilty about not returning. Little, ordinary fragments of somebody’s early days in this apartment, written in a hand that wasn’t Priya’s but described, card after card, a life that had started to feel less like a stranger’s and more like a preview.

The last card in the stack was different. It was newer, the paper crisper, the ink darker, like it hadn’t sat in that wall gap nearly as long as the others. And it wasn’t written in the past tense the way all the others had been.

Tomorrow you’ll find the loose tile under the radiator and think about pulling it up. Don’t. Not yet. You’re not ready for what’s under it, and neither was I, not on day one.

Priya read it twice, then a third time, waiting for it to resolve into something she could laugh off. It didn’t. She looked down, without meaning to, at the strip of cracked linoleum beneath the radiator across from her, at the one tile sitting slightly proud of the others, exactly where the card said it would be, in an apartment she had lived in for exactly six hours.

She hadn’t noticed that tile until right now.

She picked the last card up again, turned it over once more to check, stupidly, whether there was a date on it anywhere, some proof it had been written years ago by someone else entirely and not, impossibly, for her, this week, this apartment, this exact night.

There was a date. It was tomorrow’s.