Chapter 5B: Proxy Signature

I’d barely stepped out of the subway when my phone buzzed again.

A push notification from the home-services app sat on my lock screen: Your scheduled cleaning supplies have been signed for by a neighbor. Delivery received at: 5B.

Third time this week. I’d never entered 5B—never mind the fact that no one in this building would leave anything there.

I stopped at the entrance of the old apartment building and opened the screenshot. Timestamp: 6:12 p.m. The delivery photo showed nothing but a brown paper bag propped against a dark walnut door. The unit number was blurry, but you could make out a “5.” The app’s location tag pinpointed my floor. This wasn’t some random glitch. It felt like someone was placing orders to the same address on purpose.

“Thank God you live on this floor.”

I looked up. A girl carrying a folding cleaning tote hurried after me. Her badge read Sophie Lane. She was pale, like she’d just run up the stairs.

“Do you know where 5B is?” she asked, breathless. “I knocked on the wrong door just now—no one answered. But I swear I pressed 5B.”

I froze with my key halfway to the lock. “There isn’t a 5B on this floor.”

“There is a door,” she said immediately. “End of the hall, last one on the right. When I rang the bell, a woman inside said, ‘Just leave it by the door.’ Her voice was quiet, but I heard it.”

I stared at her, searching her face for the tell of a joke. There wasn’t one. She even glanced back toward the hallway without meaning to, like there really was something down there.

“You sure it wasn’t 4B?” I asked.

“I’ve been doing this for two years. I don’t misread letters.” Sophie handed me her phone. “The order screenshot says 5B too. The app auto-completed it as signed-for, but nobody opened up. If I just leave it somewhere and the platform says I dumped it, I’m screwed. I wanted a resident to witness it.”

Behind us, the elevator doors slid shut. The building’s damp, cold disinfectant smell seemed to thicken all at once.

I took her down to the property desk. The attendant on duty was Sam, a middle-aged guy who treated everything like it was no big deal. After he heard us out, he only frowned once. He didn’t even stand.

“5B?” he repeated, like he’d heard a tired joke. “That unit was sealed off after the fire ten years ago. No one lives there. It’s not for rent.”

Sophie jumped in. “But someone answered me.”

Sam shrugged. “Old building. Sound travels. You hear things through doors all the time. People put the wrong address into those apps every month.”

“Then why does the system show ‘signed for at 5B’ three times in a row?” I shoved my screenshot in front of him.

He looked down for two seconds, still airy. “Third-party platform. Not our problem. Bottom line, there’s no one in that unit.”

“If it’s sealed, it shouldn’t have a unit number on the door,” I said.

“Just because the plaque’s still there doesn’t mean someone’s inside.”

He slid my phone back across the counter. Message received: stop asking.

As Sophie left, she added under her breath, “When I put the bag down, I heard something dragging inside. Like someone pulled something across the floor.”

After she was gone, I went upstairs alone.

There were three tenants on this floor. I lived in 5A. Across from me was a storage room that had been empty forever. And at the very end of the hall was 5B—the unit everyone pretended didn’t exist. I rarely walked that way. It was near the fire door, the light was always dim, like the building had been cut off on purpose.

But tonight, even from the middle of the corridor, I could see it.

The plaque was still there. A brass “5B,” neatly fastened. Dust filmed the knob and the frame, like no one had touched it in years. And yet, right along the lower edge beside the door, a small patch of grime had been rubbed away, exposing darker wood underneath. Not a single scrape—repeated scuffs, like someone had been setting things down in the exact same spot over the past few days.

I crouched. At the carpet’s edge, there was a corner of clear tape stuck down—same kind as the strip sealing the paper bag in the app’s delivery photo.

A “vacant” unit, suddenly showing little scraps of life.

My shoulders tightened. I stood up, ready to go back to my apartment, lock the door, and deal with this tomorrow.

But the moment I turned, in the corner of my eye, a thin line of warm yellow light slid out from beneath the door—beneath the door that had supposedly been sealed for ten years.