When I got home that Wednesday afternoon, my neighbor, Mrs. Halvorsen, was standing on her porch with her arms crossed and a look much more annoyed than usual. ‘Your house is very noisy during the day, Marcus,’ he complained. ‘Someone is screaming in there.’

“When I got home, my neighbor confronted me: ‘Your house is very noisy during the day!’ That’s not possible,’ I replied. ‘There shouldn’t be anyone inside.’ But she insisted: ‘I heard a man screaming.’ The next day, I pretended to go to work and hid under the bed. Hours passed… Then a voice came into my room, and I froze…

‘That’s impossible,’ I said, balancing the shopping bags. ‘I live alone. And I’m at work all day.’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘Well, someone is there. I heard screams again around noon. A man’s voice. I knocked on the door, but no one answered.’

His insistence made me uneasy, but I forced a laugh. ‘It’s probably television. Sometimes I leave it on to scare away thieves.’

But upon entering, the air felt strange, as if the house was holding its breath. I stopped shopping and walked from room to room. Everything was exactly where I left it. No open windows. No signs of forced entry. No footprints on the wooden floors. Nothing was missing. I convinced myself that my neighbor had just misheard and pushed the thought out of my mind.

That night I hardly slept.

The next morning, after pacing back and forth in my kitchen for half an hour, I made up my mind. I called my manager, told him I was feeling sick, and stayed home. At 7:45 a.m., I opened the garage door, pulled my car out just enough for the neighbors to see, then turned off the engine and quietly pushed the car back inside. I went back through the side door, quickly went to my room, and slid under the bed, pulling the comforter down just enough to hide. My heart was pounding so hard that I was worried he would give me away.

Minutes turned into hours. Silence spread through the house, heavy and suffocating. Around 11:20 a.m., just as I was beginning to doubt my own sanity, I heard the unmistakable sound of the front door opening.

Slow. Careful. Familiar.

Footsteps moved down the corridor with the casual confidence of someone who thought he belonged there. Shoes lightly skimming the floor; a rhythm that he recognized but could not immediately place. My breath was short.

Then, footsteps entered my room.

A man’s voice—low, irritated—murmured, ‘You always leave so much mess, Marcus…’

My blood froze.

He knew my name.

And the voice sounded impossibly familiar.

I froze, every muscle blocked by terror, as the shadow of his legs moved across the room and stopped right next to the bed.

I lay under the bed, forcing myself to remain silent as the dust covered my throat with each shallow breath. The man in my room moved with unsettling confidence, opening drawers and moving objects around as if he had memorized every inch of my space. His voice—calm but irritated—kept pulling on a memory he couldn’t reach.

A drawer in the dresser slammed shut, and he muttered, ‘You always hide things in different places, Marcus…’

My skin crawled. How do you know what I’m doing?

He walked to the closet, sliding the door open. The perches sounded softly. From my vantage point under the bed, I only saw his boots: brown leather, wrinkled from years of use but recently polished. This was not a frightened thief. I was not in a hurry. He was not cautious. He behaved like someone who returns home after a long absence.

I needed to understand who I was. Inch by inch, I moved to the edge of the bed to widen my vision. He reached for the top shelf and grabbed a blue box that I didn’t recognize. He opened it, whispered something in an accent I couldn’t identify, and continued poking around.

Then my phone vibrated in my pocket.

The sound was barely audible, but it might as well have been an explosion. He stood still immediately. My breath stopped in my chest.

Slowly, he crouched down. His boots turned toward the bed.

Then his fingers appeared, curving around the quilt as he lifted it to look underneath.

I rolled to the opposite side and barely stood up. He lunged, throwing a lamp as I stumbled backwards. When he straightened up, I finally saw his face clearly.

He looked like me. Not perfectly—his jaw was wider, his nose slightly crooked, his hair thicker—but the resemblance was enough to make my stomach turn. He looked at me with a strange mixture of irritation and resignation.

‘You weren’t supposed to be here,’ he said calmly.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded, gripping the lamp like a weapon.

‘My name is Adrian,’ he replied, raising his hands. ‘I didn’t plan for you to find out like that.’

‘What are you doing in my house?’

‘I’ve been staying here. Only during the day. You leave for hours. You never realize.’

My pulse was hammering. ‘Have you been living here for months?’

‘Yes,’ he admitted quietly. ‘I wasn’t trying to hurt you.’

‘You forced your way into my house!’

‘I didn’t enter by force.’

‘What does that mean?’

He hesitated, his eyes drifting into the hallway. ‘I have a key.’

A chill ran through my body. ‘Where did you get a key to my house?’

He swallowed hard, then replied with devastating simplicity. ‘From your father’.

‘My father died when I was nineteen,’ I said, with the lamp still clutched in my hand.

Adrian nodded. ‘I know.’

‘Then how did he give you a key?’

He exhaled slowly and sat on the edge of the bed, showing no trace of fear. ‘Because he was also my father’.

For a moment, the words didn’t sink in. They felt impossible, like a puzzle piece in the wrong box. I stared at him, expecting sarcasm or some sign that he was delirious. But his expression remained firm.

‘You’re lying,’ I said firmly.

‘I don’t.’ He opened the blue box he had taken earlier. ‘Your father left this. I wanted you to find it someday.’

Inside were old, worn, yellowed letters, all in my father’s handwriting. I opened the first one. It wasn’t addressed to my mother, but to a woman named Elena. As I read, my chest tightened. The next letter revealed more: a hidden relationship, a son, a life that my father had compartmentalized and hidden from us.

A son named Adrian Keller.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I whispered.

Adrian shrugged his shoulders with a strange softness. ‘Maybe he wanted to protect your mother. Or protect you. Families get complicated. He did what he thought he had to do.’

‘But why come here now? Why sneak into my house?’

He rubbed his forehead. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Six months ago, I lost my job. My apartment became unsafe. I had nowhere to go. I looked for relatives, but no one believed my story. This house… was the closest thing I had left to him.’

I tried to absorb his words. None of it excused what he had done, but the desperation in his voice was real.

‘You could have talked to me,’ I said.

Adrian let out a hollow laugh. ‘Showing up at your door and saying, ‘Hey, I’m the brother you never knew existed’? I didn’t think you’d believe me.’

We sat in a tense silence. The anger that boiled inside me slowly transformed into confusion, pain, and a strange, reluctant empathy.

‘You can’t stay at my house,’ I finally said.

‘I know.’

‘But you don’t have to disappear either.’ I swallowed. ‘If you’re telling the truth, I want to know. About him. About everything.’

Adrian’s eyes softened. That wary, hardened look he’d had since I first saw him finally broke.

‘I’d like that,’ he said quietly.

And that’s how we talked: about our father, about our childhood, about the strange parallel paths of our lives. It didn’t erase the fear or the violation of my privacy. But it revealed something unexpected.

Not an intruder.

A brother.

Someone who had been alone for too long, just like me.”