The Booking Window

The notification came through at 6:12 a.m., a soft chime from the phone on the nightstand. I opened one eye. The screen glowed with a booking confirmation for that evening, a one-night stay under the name A. Mercer. No profile photo. No previous reviews. The platform had already taken the payout from a card ending in 4417.

I sat up. The bedroom was gray with early light. I had not opened my calendar for the week. I had a freelance copyedit due Thursday, the manuscript for a cardiologist's memoir, and I had blocked the apartment off until Friday so I could work in the quiet. The app showed the reservation as instant-booked, which the listing did not allow. I had turned that off after a woman from Phoenix left a hot plate burning on the kitchen counter.

I checked the lock log. The door had not been opened. The booking sat there, confirmed, a small blue circle around the guest's initial. A. Mercer. I refreshed the page twice. The reservation stayed.

I got up and cleaned anyway. The apartment is a one-bedroom on the third floor of a brick building in Somerville, the kind with radiators that knock and windows that stick when the humidity climbs. My mother died here two years ago, in the bedroom, on a Tuesday. I kept the lease because the rent was low and because I could still find her in the apartment, in the dent on the couch cushion and the chip in the bathroom sink where she dropped a glass in 2019. The platform income helped with the rent. The apartment paid for itself, mostly.

I made the bed with the good sheets, the ones with the small blue flowers. I wiped down the kitchen counters with the lemon spray my mother used, the yellow bottle from the hardware store on Broadway. I folded the towels and set them on the bathroom shelf. The bathroom smelled faintly of chlorine. I had not been to a pool. I opened the window above the tub and left it cracked.

The guest was set to arrive at 4:00 p.m. I packed my laptop and the cardiologist's manuscript into a canvas tote and left at noon. I walked to the coffee shop on Highland Avenue and worked there until the afternoon light turned gold across the street. At 3:50 I got a notification that A. Mercer had checked in. The smart lock had been opened with the code I had sent through the platform.

I stayed at the coffee shop until six. I ordered a second coffee and a pastry I did not want. The barista wiped down the counter with a rag that smelled like bleach, and I thought about the bathroom again, the chlorine, the window I had left open.

When I came home at 7:15, the apartment was empty. The door locked behind me with the same soft click. I stood in the entryway and listened. The radiators knocked once, twice. The refrigerator hummed. No luggage by the door. No shoes on the mat. The living room was exactly as I had left it, the couch cushions smooth, the remote on the armrest, the stack of mail on the table by the window.

The bed had been made. Not the way I made it. The corners were pulled tighter, the pillowcases smoothed flat. The towels in the bathroom had been refolded, the edges aligned. A small square of toilet paper had been torn from the roll and left on the back of the sink.

On my mother's bookshelf, one book had been turned spine-in. The shelf held her collection of gardening manuals and a row of paperbacks she had bought at the library sale on Somerville Avenue. The spine-in book was the one with the cracked green cover, her guide to New England perennials. I pulled it out and set it back the right way. The pages smelled like dust.

I checked the lock log. The door had opened once at 3:58 p.m. and once at 6:47 p.m. The guest had been inside for less than three hours. No review had been left. No message. The platform showed the reservation as completed.

I changed the lock code. I set it to 4471, the last four digits of my mother's phone number. The app accepted it. I went to bed with the phone on the nightstand and the window in the living room open a few inches, enough to hear the buses on Highland Avenue.

Two nights later, the lock code was different. I came back from the grocery store with a bag of apples and a carton of eggs, and the keypad beeped twice and flashed red. I typed my code again. The light stayed red. I stood on the landing with the grocery