I woke up to find my disaster of a kitchen spotless. Then, groceries I didn’t buy appeared in my fridge. I live alone with my kids, no one has a key, and I was losing my mind…
until I hid behind the couch at 3 a.m. and saw who’d been sneaking in. I’m 40 years old, and I’m raising two kids on my own.
Jeremy just turned five, and Sophie is three. You learn pretty fast who you are when the noise dies down and there’s no one left to blame. Their father walked out the door three weeks after Sophie was born, leaving me with a stack of unpaid bills, two babies who couldn’t sleep through the night, and a marriage that dissolved faster than I could process it.
I work from home as a freelance accountant, which isn’t glamorous. But it pays the rent and keeps the lights on while giving me the flexibility to be here when the kids need me. Most days, I’m juggling client calls while refereeing fights over toy trucks and wiping juice spills off the couch.
By the time I tuck my kids into bed, I’m so exhausted I can barely stand. That Monday night, I’d been up until almost one in the morning finishing a quarterly report for a client. The kitchen was a wreck.
Dishes piled in the sink. Crumbs scattered across the counter. And a sticky patch on the floor where Sophie had spilled her chocolate milk earlier.
I knew I should clean it, but I was too tired to care. I’d deal with it in the morning. When I walked into the kitchen at six the next day, I froze in the doorway.
The dishes were washed and stacked neatly on the drying rack. The counters were spotless. The floor was swept.
I stood there for a full minute, staring at the clean kitchen like it was some kind of optical illusion. Then I walked over to Jeremy’s room and poked my head inside. “Buddy, did you clean the kitchen last night?”
He looked up from the Lego tower he was building and giggled.
“Mommy, I can’t even reach the sink.”
Fair point.
I tried to convince myself I’d done it in some kind of exhausted haze… that I’d sleepwalked my way through the dishes and forgotten about it. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Two days later, it happened again.
I opened the fridge to grab milk for Jeremy’s cereal, and I froze. There were groceries inside that I definitely hadn’t bought. A fresh carton of eggs.
A loaf of bread. A bag of apples. All things I’d been meaning to pick up but hadn’t had time for.
“Did Grandma stop by?” I asked Jeremy as he climbed into his chair. He shook his head, mouth full of cereal. My stomach twisted.
My parents live three states away, and my neighbors are friendly, but not “let myself into your house and stock your fridge” friendly. And I’m the only one with a key. A few days after that, I noticed the trash had been taken out and replaced with a fresh liner.
Then the sticky spots on the kitchen table, the ones I’d been meaning to scrub for a week… were gone. My coffee maker, which I never had time to clean properly, was sparkling and already set up with a fresh filter. I started second-guessing everything.
Was I losing my mind? Was this some kind of stress-induced memory loss?
I thought about buying a camera, but I couldn’t afford one right now. So instead, I decided to wait.
Last night, after tucking the kids into bed and triple-checking that their doors were closed, I grabbed a blanket and hid behind the couch in the living room. I set an alarm on my phone for every hour, just in case I dozed off. At 2:47 a.m., I heard it.
The soft click of the back door. I didn’t move, barely breathing as the sound of footsteps came next… slow, cautious, like someone trying not to wake anyone. My heart was pounding so hard I thought whoever it was might hear it.
A shadow moved through the hallway, tall and broad-shouldered. Definitely a man. I gripped the edge of the couch cushion, every muscle in my body tensed as the figure moved into the kitchen.
I heard the fridge door open, and light spilled out into the dark room, casting long shadows across the floor. He bent down, reaching inside, and I could see his hand moving, rearranging things. Then he straightened up, holding a gallon of milk, set it on the shelf, picked up the old one, and closed the door.
When he turned, the hallway light caught his face. I felt like someone had punched me in the chest. It was Luke.
My ex-husband. For a moment, neither of us moved. He just stood there, holding the half-empty milk jug, staring at me like he’d seen a ghost.
“Luke?” I gasped. He flinched, his mouth opening, but no words came out. I stepped out from behind the couch, my hands shaking.
“What are you… Oh my God… What are you doing here?”
He looked down at the milk in his hand, then back at me. “I didn’t want to wake the kids.”
“How did you get in? How do you have a key?”
“You never changed the locks,” he said softly.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page to discover the rest 🔎👇
