The Stranger Who Forgot to Log Out of Our Living Room

All I wanted was the couch.

It had been one of those shifts where the clock seemed to move backward, where every customer arrived already irritated and left more so, and by the time I climbed the stairs to our apartment my body felt like something poured out of a cup. I dropped my bag by the door without aiming. I didn't turn on the kitchen light. I lowered myself onto the cushions the way you lower yourself into warm water, and I reached for the remote and pressed the button that I had pressed a thousand times.

The television woke up. The streaming app loaded. And it did not know me.

Where my own profile should have glowed, there was a small square avatar in a color I had never chosen, and beneath it a name. Eric. I read it twice, the way you reread a word that has stopped making sense. We did not know an Eric. I scrolled, half-convinced the app had simply glitched, and instead the whole screen rearranged itself around a stranger's appetite. War documentaries. A comedy I'd never heard Daniel mention. A half-watched thriller frozen at the forty-minute mark, a green progress bar sitting under it like a fingerprint.

Forty minutes. Long enough to be background noise. Long enough to fill a quiet room while two people stopped paying attention to it.

I sat very still. The apartment was the same apartment, the throw blanket folded the way I'd folded it that morning, the two mugs in the rack, the photograph of us on the shelf turned at its usual careless angle. Nothing had been moved, and that was somehow the worst part, the way the room had absorbed it all and rearranged itself back into innocence. Only the television had failed to clean up after itself. Only the television had been left signed in, a calling card glowing in the dark because some stranger had been in too much of a hurry, leaving, to log himself out.

I thought about the timeline the way you'd thumb a bruise. Daniel had texted me at noon to say he'd be at the gym, then running errands, then home late. He had built an entire afternoon out of small plausible bricks. And in the gap he'd left in it, a man named Eric had sat on my couch, under my blanket, and reached for my remote, and put on something to fill the silence.

I didn't cry, not then. I picked up my phone and I photographed the screen. The avatar, the name, the half-watched thriller, the timestamp in the corner. I did it calmly, the way you document a thing you already know you'll need. Then I logged Eric out, and the app asked me, politely, who was watching. My own profile sat there waiting, exactly where it had always been.

When Daniel's key turned in the lock an hour later, the television was off and I was sitting in the dark, and I let him get all the way to "hey, you're home early" before I asked him, very quietly, who Eric was.

I have never watched a face do what his did. He didn't even ask what I meant.