The Woman Next Door
The Woman Next Door
A Short Story
I had lived next to them for almost eight months before I really noticed her.
Their house sat just twenty feet from mine, separated by a low wooden fence and a narrow strip of grass that neither of us ever bothered to maintain properly. Most evenings I could hear the low murmur of their television through the open windows, or the occasional clink of dishes being washed. Sometimes, late at night, I heard softer sounds—the kind that made me turn my music up a little louder and pretend I wasn’t listening.
Her name was Claire.
I learned it the day she came over to ask if I had a ladder she could borrow. It was a Saturday in early June, the air already thick with the kind of humidity that made clothes stick to skin. She stood on my porch in a soft white tank top and faded denim shorts that had seen better years, her dark hair pulled back in a messy knot. There was a faint sheen of sweat at her temples and along the line of her collarbones. She looked like she had been working outside for a while.
“Hi,” she said, offering a small, polite smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’m Claire, from next door. I was wondering if you had a ladder I could borrow for a couple of hours? One of the gutters is clogged and my husband is away until Monday.”
Her husband. Mark. I had spoken to him twice—once about the shared fence line, once when a package of his ended up on my porch by mistake. He seemed like a decent enough guy. Quiet. Worked long hours. The kind of man who nodded when you spoke and then went back inside.
I told her I had a ladder in the garage. I carried it over myself even though she insisted she could manage. Up close she smelled like sunscreen and something faintly floral underneath, maybe the lotion she used after showering. When she reached up to take the ladder from me, the tank top lifted just enough to show a thin strip of pale skin above the waistband of her shorts. I looked away a second too late, and I knew she noticed.
After that, I started noticing her more.
She worked in the garden most weekends, kneeling in the dirt with a wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow over her face, the sun turning the tops of her shoulders and the back of her neck a soft pink. Sometimes she came outside in the evenings after Mark left for whatever late meetings or dinners seemed to fill his calendar, ...