“Hey! You okay in there?”
No response came, only a faint dragging noise from inside, like something being pulled across the floor inch by inch. My grip tightened around my phone, thumb hovering over the emergency call. The silence that followed felt heavier than the noise itself, stretching just long enough to make the worst possibilities feel real. I knocked again, harder this time, my voice sharper, more urgent.
“Open the door or I’m calling the police!”
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, painfully, I heard movement—closer this time. A shuffle. A pause. The soft click of a lock turning. The door opened just a few inches, barely enough to reveal anything beyond darkness. And in that narrow gap, every assumption I had built in my head about what was happening inside began to unravel.
The first thing that hit me wasn’t what I saw, but what I smelled—a strange mix of something sterile and something wrong, like a hospital that had been left too long without care. I pushed the door open wider without waiting for permission, the urgency overriding whatever boundaries should have been there. The apartment wasn’t violent chaos like I had imagined. There were no signs of a fight, no broken furniture, no overturned tables. Instead, it was something quieter, more unsettling: cluttered surfaces covered in pill bottles, half-empty water containers, crumpled towels, and scattered medical supplies that didn’t belong in a normal living room.
And in the center of it all was him—slumped against the couch, barely upright, his breathing shallow and uneven as if every inhale cost him something. His skin was pale in a way that didn’t look natural, and his hands trembled with a kind of exhaustion that went beyond simple illness. For a moment, I just stood there, the shift from fear to confusion hitting me harder than anything I had expected.
“I’m fine,” he said quickly, too quickly, like the words had been prepared in advance.
