The Woman at the Third Window

The third-floor flat had been empty for years, but that never stopped the building's residents, generation after generation almost, from seeing a woman standing at its window at dusk, staring silently out at the street.

I moved into this building eight months ago, and knew nothing about this story until I asked, for no clear reason, about my "neighbor" on the third floor, only because I thought I'd seen a shadow at her window one evening.

Neighbors told me the flat had been shut and locked for a very long time. No one could tell me exactly how long, or who the last known tenant had even been.

Unable to drop it, I started asking residents who'd lived in the building longer than me. More than one new tenant before me, I later learned, had politely asked about their "neighbor" in the third-floor flat, only to be told the same thing every time: the flat had been empty and locked for a very long time. Management, though, still lists it officially as "occupied," small bills paid regularly from an account no one in the office can trace.

Serious about it now, not just curious, I started asking more widely, not just my own floor, but anyone who'd ever lived in the building, through an old resident group chat one of my neighbors still had. More than a dozen people answered, most of whom had never met each other. I hadn't given any of them a description.

Every single one, independently, mentioned the same detail I hadn't asked about: she never blinks.

I stopped looking directly at that window after that, like everyone before me in this building, as I later discovered. But a few days ago, I passed the building right at dusk, coming home from work, and looked up without meaning to, on a purely involuntary impulse.

She was there, as always, staring out toward the street the way everyone had described.

Except this time, for the first time since I moved in, her eyes weren't turned toward the street.

They were turned directly toward me, even though, from that angle, three floors up, she shouldn't have been able to pick me out of the street at all.