The man started appearing in my photos three weeks ago. Not in every photo — at first it seemed random. A picture of my living room, and there he was in the background, standing by the window. A selfie at the grocery store, and he was two aisles over, watching. A photo of my dog’s bowl on the kitchen floor, and there were his shoes at the edge of the frame, just the shoes, like someone had cut him out of another picture and pasted them in.

But he wasn’t pasted. The photos were digital, untampered, verified by every analysis tool I ran. He was just there. In my life. In my images. Watching.

The first thing I did was change all my locks. I live alone — I have lived alone for two years since my divorce, and the idea of someone in my house without my knowing it sent a cold spike through my chest every time I thought about it. But when I checked the locks, when I had a security company sweep my apartment, when I set up cameras in every room, I found nothing. No sign of intrusion. No evidence that anyone had been there but me.

The cameras showed only me. My empty apartment. My empty life. And yet the photos kept coming.

A picture of my bedroom ceiling — and he’s sitting in the chair by the window, his face in shadow. A photo of my bathroom mirror before I step into the shower — and he’s standing in the doorway behind me, reflected in the glass. A photo of my laptop screen with a work email — and he’s leaning over my shoulder, close enough that his face is clear, distinct, identifiable. Medium height. Brown hair going gray. Deep-set eyes. A mouth set in something that might be a smile or might be a grimace. Someone’s father. Someone’s husband. Someone’s someone.

I tried showing the photos to other people. My sister. My coworkers. A police officer at the precinct who owed me a favor. Everyone looked at the photos and saw only me. Only my rooms, my belongings, my life. No man. No stranger in the background. Nothing.

“Your eyes are playing tricks on you,” my sister said. “You’re stressed. You’re not sleeping. You’re seeing things that aren’t there.”

But I wasn’t seeing things. I was photographing them. And the camera didn’t lie.

Last week, I went to a friend’s birthday party. I didn’t want to go — I hadn’t been sleeping well, I was paranoid, I didn’t want to be around people. But she was insistent and I was lonely and I thought maybe being somewhere else, somewhere public, somewhere with witnesses and noise and life, would break whatever was happening to me.

Someone took a group photo. She sent it to me the next day. I opened it on my phone and I scrolled through the faces of my friends — smiling, laughing, drunk on cheap champagne — and then I found myself. I found myself at the edge of the frame. And standing directly behind me, close enough to touch, was the man.

His face was clear. No shadow. No ambiguity. I could see his eyes — dark, hollow, patient — and his mouth was open, and I could see his tongue, and he was leaning in toward my ear like he was about to tell me a secret.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about calling in sick to work, about checking myself into a hospital, about throwing away my phone and camera and computer and going to live in the woods where there were no mirrors or screens or reflective surfaces to catch whatever was happening to me.

At 3 AM, I gave up. I got out of bed and went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water and stood at the window looking out at the street below. The city was quiet. Empty. The streetlights cast orange pools on the pavement and the parked cars sat in rows like sleeping animals and nothing moved except a single figure on the corner, standing under a streetlight, looking up at my building.

Looking up at my window.

I dropped the glass. It shattered on the floor and I didn’t care. I ran to the light switch and turned off every light in my apartment and then I went to the window and I looked down again and he was still there, and he was still looking up, and then — slowly, deliberately — he raised one hand and pointed. At my window. At me.

He smiled.

I called the police. They sent a car. They found no one on the corner. No footprints in the dirt. No sign that anyone had been standing there at all. The officer suggested I see a doctor. She was kind about it. She didn’t say I was crazy, but I could tell she thought it.

The next night, I was in bed — awake, couldn’t sleep — and I heard a sound from my living room. A creak. The sound of weight shifting on floorboards. I lay there and listened and I heard footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Moving from one room to another. Someone was in my apartment. Someone was walking through my living room, and then my kitchen, and then stopping at the hallway that led to my bedroom.

I reached for my phone to call 911. As my hand closed around it, the screen lit up. A notification. The camera app had detected movement and started recording.

The footage showed my empty living room. My empty kitchen. My empty hallway. No one there. No intruder. But at the end of the video — the last three seconds — the camera caught the hallway, and the door to my bedroom, and you could see the door slowly opening. No hand on the knob. No force you could see. Just the door swinging inward, inch by inch, until the gap was wide enough for something to fit through.

The video ended.

I haven’t opened the door in the morning. I haven’t. For three days I’ve been sleeping with my back against the door, pushing against it with all my weight, terrified to open it and find out what’s been waiting for me on the other side. I’ve been eating food from my pantry. I’ve been peeing in a bucket because I can’t bring myself to walk down the hallway to the bathroom. I’ve been surviving.

But I can’t do this forever.

Tonight, I decided to look. I got up from the bed and I walked to the door and I put my hand on the knob and I felt the cold metal under my palm and I thought: if he’s in there, I need to know. I need to see his face. I need to understand why he’s doing this to me.

I opened the door.

My living room was empty. My kitchen was empty. Every room was empty. But on the kitchen table, there was a photograph. It wasn’t there before. I know it wasn’t there before because I searched that table obsessively when I started locking myself in my bedroom, and there was nothing on it but a stack of bills and a half-dead succulent.

The photograph was old. Sepia-toned. Polaroid, maybe, from the 1970s. It showed a house — my house, my building, my apartment — and standing in front of it was a man. The same man from all my photos. The same dark eyes, the same hollow cheeks, the same smile that wasn’t quite a smile.

On the back of the photograph, in handwriting I didn’t recognize but somehow knew was his:

“I found you. It took so long. But I found you. And now you have to find me.”

Beneath that, an address. A location I’ve never heard of, in a town that doesn’t appear on any map I can find.

I know I should throw the photograph away. I know I should burn it and call the police and never think about this again. But there’s something else in my head now. A voice. Not his — mine. Asking questions. Wanting answers. Wondering what happens if I go to that address. Wondering what’s waiting for me there.

Wondering if I’ll find him. Or if he’ll find me first.