4:04 p.m.

Imagine this: You move into a nice apartment. Really nice. It’s big, and it has everything you were looking for. (Two bedrooms. Washer/Dryer hookups.) The rent is good too.

Almost immediately there’s a problem you can’t shake: a gripping feeling that someone is watching you.

It varies throughout the day. It’s worse when you’re alone. But it’s there all the time.

On a fall day, you’re cleaning the bathroom. The toilet. The bathtub. Running the shower to rinse it away. You sit in the front room to take a break, and there’s the downstairs neighbor’s brother in your front yard. He’s looking through the front window, skulking, and he takes off as soon as he sees you. Sees that you see him.

Of course, everyone tries to convince you that maybe you didn’t see things quite right. Or there was a reason. He was looking for a package. He was checking the mail. He was walking around the house from his car.

Really, there’s no reason for him to be there. And you know that. So do they. (Friends and family always seem so ready to defend what you could call “reality.” Even if they don’t believe it.)

So you decide to push the feeing aside. As much as you can. To forget what could happen, and focus on what is happening. For a few months—with new locks on the doors, a chain, and a motion sensor camera—it almost works.

But things aren’t exactly right. And you know that—even if you can’t say why. As much as you try. You dread being at home, and you can’t quite live your life like normal.

It’s little things. How the brother always seems to be getting in or out of his car after you take a shower. How they seem to go in and out of their house more often when you have people over. Slamming the doors. Loitering on the stairs. In the shared foyer.

After a few months, you aren’t quite as nervous, but you’re not yourself.

Then it’s New Year’s Day, a Thursday. You have houseguests, friends from out-of-town, and your playing Rock Band. You’ve haven’t been opening your windows, but you do. Because why not. People are there. Your husband is home. So when you see your neighbor looking through your windows again, you’re surprised. Kind of.

And really that’s the end of the story. I loosely tried to convince Rachel to ignore it again. But not really. If it happens once, it could be an innocent misunderstanding. Twice, and it’s not.

What made it obvious that we had to move out, however, is the two times I talked to the neighbor about it. The first was the Monday after it happened. We’d waited two days, for some reason, to cal the police. The officer recommends that he make a visit, which he did on Saturday. The neighbor must have stewed over it for two days. Then on Monday, he walked up to our door, and told me they had every right to look through our windows if they were open, and if we didn’t want them to we’d have to keep our blinds closed.

Something I noticed: We hadn’t caught the neighbor looking through the windows. Just his brother. But he kept saying “we.” “We are” this. Or “we are” that. “We were just curious who lived above us.” “We don’t want to worry your going to call the police if we walk by and you have your windows open.”

He kept talking about how his brother didn’t live there. He lived an hour away in Saratoga Springs. Even though we could hear him early in the morning, 4 a.m. early, and late at night. We didn’t want him to live there of course. But it’s not like that’s why we called the police.

I talked to him one more time. Rachel and I went to his door. Told him we weren’t trying to make him feel threatened. We just wanted them to mind their own business. But also that, if we saw his brother in the front yard again, we would call the police.

He didn’t say much. Except to repeat the same thing he had kept saying a few days before. My brother doesn’t live here. I felt it was clear we shouldn’t stay.

These were strange people anyway. They rarely left their apartment. They never had visitors. And he would scream and yell at his kids all hours of the day. (We assumed he was unemployed.) His kids, by the way, could only have been three and four at the oldest.

What made the decision for me, though, was that neither my neighbor nor his brother apologized for looking in the windows. (If I had a misunderstanding where someone thought I was looking in his or her windows, I would apologize. Wouldn’t you?) And he seemed too eager to convince us that his brother didn’t live there.

Even if they aren’t perverts, I wasn’t willing to risk my wife’s safety. No matter how much I didn’t want to have to move, that’s not something I would even wager—especially against the integrity of weirdoes that I don’t know.

I can, of course, never know what the best decision was. But I’m confident about the one I made. Because here’s my end to this story: We were moving the last of our furniture out. Rachel wasn’t there. My Dad was in the bathroom. And I decided to check the mail one last time.

The neighbor’s brother was walking up the alley. He didn’t see me, so I went back inside and watched him through the window. He stopped at the top of the driveway, turned around and stared at our apartment for what had to be two minutes. He finally started walking up the street, so I walked outside to get the mail. And I saw him stopped two houses down and stare through the windows of a house on the corner. For even longer this time. Long enough that I almost had time to run inside so my Dad could see.

Almost.