The Nanny's Neighbor

Ethan dumped me three months ago, and I'm still not over it. I'm twenty-four, I work as a nanny, which sounds cute until you explain I spend my days wiping applesauce off a four-year-old and arguing with a seven-year-old about bedtime. My ex was thirty when he did it, which means he was a grown adult who knew exactly what he was doing when he decided to sleep with somebody else and then move out of our apartment while I was at the park with two kids who weren't even mine.

Here's how I found out. He left me a note. A note, on the fridge, held up by the magnet shaped like a pineapple that I bought on our first vacation together. The note said he'd met someone and he was sorry and he hoped we could still be friends. Then I checked his Instagram like any normal person having a breakdown, and there was Cliff.

I've seen exactly one photo of Cliff. Dark hair, broad shoulders, kind of a square jaw, the kind of guy who looks good even in a picture his boyfriend took at a restaurant where the lighting was terrible. That's all I know about him. That's all I need to know about him. Ethan left me, a person he'd lived with for two years, for a man whose entire personality I could only guess at, and my guess was that his personality was "looks better than me."

So yeah, I had a grudge. It sat in my chest like a bad burrito. I'd been living alone in my messy little apartment, babysitting during the day and eating cereal for dinner at night, stewing about it every single evening. My friend Tammy told me to download a dating app and move on. I told her I was fine. I was not fine.

Then one Tuesday in October I ran into the guy in the hallway.

I want to back up and explain that I live in a quiet apartment building on a street that's busier than it should be. Six months ago somebody moved into 4C, two doors down from me, and I'd never once seen him. I'd heard him, though. He has heavy footsteps and he drops his keys about every third night, which I know because my bedroom wall is close to the hallway.

That Tuesday I came home around seven with a bag of takeout and there he was, fumbling at his own door, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor. Dark hair. Broad shoulders. Square jaw. It was Cliff. Standing in my hallway. Living two doors down from me.

He looked up and said, "Oh, hey," the way you do to a neighbor you've never actually met, and I said "Hey" back with my voice doing something weird, and then we both went into our apartments and I stood in my kitchen holding cold noodles and vibrating with anger.

Because here's what I decided in that moment, standing there in socks: Ethan's new boyfriend had moved into my building. That was the story I wrote in my head, no fact-checking, no hesitation. Cliff had somehow tracked down where I lived, or it was a coincidence, or the universe was playing a joke on me, and the exact mechanics didn't matter because the picture was the picture. The man who ruined my relationship was now close enough that I could smell his cooking through the walls.

The revenge plan arrived about ten minutes later, while I was eating noodles straight out of the carton. It was simple and, I thought at the time, extremely satisfying. Ethan took something from me. So I would take something from Ethan. I would seduce Cliff, right here in my building, and then at some point there would be a moment, maybe over text, maybe in person, where Ethan found out, and he would feel exactly as sick as I felt in July.

I'm not proud of the plan. I want to say that now, at the start, because the story doesn't go where the plan goes, and I look a lot better if you know I know it was a bad idea. But at the time it felt like justice.

The problem was I had no idea how to seduce anyone. I'd been with Ethan since I was twenty-two and out of practice didn't even cover it. So I rehearsed. I literally rehearsed in my bathroom mirror, which I'm admitting here because an honest story is a better story even when it's embarrassing.

"Hey, neighbor," I practiced. "I'm Dirk, from down the hall. I made too much pasta. Do you want some?"

Too much pasta. Did I have too much pasta? No. I had exactly enough pasta and also a box of cereal. But it was a plausible opener, and it gave him a reason to come to my door, and then things could develop.

I tried it again, friendlier. "Hey, neighbor! God, I've been meaning to introduce myself. I'm Dirk. You new here?" He'd been there six months, so "you new here" was a risk, but people forget things, and he'd have no reason to suspect I'd spent half a year not knowing his face.

Then Tuesday came around again and I heard the keys drop in the hallway and I did not hesitate, because if I hesitated I'd lose my nerve. I opened my door with a beer in each hand, from the six-pack I'd bought specifically as a prop, and I called out, "Hey! Hey, sorry, you got a second?"

He turned around. Up close he was even more Cliff than from far away, which threw me for a second, but I pushed through.

"I'm Dirk, 4A. I've been meaning to come say hi, you know how it is, life gets stupid." I held up the beers. "I've got two and no one to drink them with. You want one? I'm not a weirdo, I promise, I just figured, neighbors, we should know each other's names in case of, like, a fire."

That last part came out fast and he laughed, which I took as a good sign. He had a nice laugh, which annoyed me, because it made the revenge plan feel more complicated.

"Sure, yeah," he said. "I'm Dwayne."

And I want you to understand what happened in my head at that moment, which was nothing. Absolutely nothing. My brain was so locked onto the photo of Cliff that the name Dwayne just bounced off it. I heard it, I registered it as a name, and I filed it under "Cliff, alias" without a single question. People do this. I've since learned people do this constantly. You have a theory and the world hands you evidence against it and you just set the evidence down and keep walking.

"Nice to meet you, Dwayne," I said, and did not blink, and waved him into my apartment, which was messy in the specific way a nanny's apartment is messy, kids' art supplies on the coffee table because I bring work home, a sippy cup in the dish rack that I kept meaning to return. I kicked a dinosaur figurine under the couch on the way past.

He sat on my couch and took the beer and looked around and said, "You got kids?"

"No, I'm a nanny. Those are work souvenirs. You're an architect, right?"

He gave me a look. "How'd you know that?"

Lucky guess, I said, which was a lie, I actually knew nothing, I just guessed architect because he looked like a guy with a nice watch, and it turned out he was an architect, which made me feel briefly psychic. He moved here six months ago from a job in the city, he'd been buried in work, he hadn't dated in years, he said all of this easily while I nodded along and thought, you're going down, Cliff.

We drank one beer and then he stayed for a second one, which I had not planned for but accepted as fate. Somewhere in the second beer he said, "This is nice. I keep meaning to meet people in the building and then I just work all the time."

"Same," I lied, meaning the part about the building, and we clinked bottles, and I remember thinking the hardest part was over. I had him on my couch. The plan was working.

I had no idea, yet, how not-working it was.

So there we were, second beer, my couch, and the clock in my head was ticking because I didn't want to do this at beer four, when the whole thing would feel heavy and sad instead of fun. My plan, such as it was, involved steering the conversation toward hookups, letting him know I was single and available, and then seeing what happened. I'd practiced this too, in the mirror, which I have now fully confessed.

"So are you seeing anyone?" I asked. "New in town, six months, that's a long dry spell for a guy with your shoulders."

He almost choked on his beer, which I counted as a win. "Wow, straight to it."

"Sorry," I said, not sorry at all. "I'm just saying, a guy like you shouldn't be sitting on my couch on a Tuesday drinking free beer. You should be out being fought over."

"That's a lot of fighting over a guy who mostly makes spreadsheets about concrete." He grinned and took another sip. "No, nobody. I dated a guy for a while back when I was twenty-two, but it fizzled. Work ate everything since then. What about you? Somebody's got to be keeping you busy."

"Nobody right now," I said. "Actually, nobody for about three months, and before that, a real piece of work." I said it lightly but I could hear the edge coming through. Dwayne heard it too.

"Rough breakup?"

"He cheated," I said. "Two years together and he slept with somebody else and moved out while I was at the park with two kids. I came home to a note on the fridge. A note, held up by a pineapple magnet.