The afternoon I texted her from a conference in another state, lonely and bored, telling her I missed her and couldn’t wait to get home, and she wrote back aw, the apartment misses you too, hurry home — and the camera showed her inside my apartment as she typed it.

She had been standing in my living room, among my things, having just let herself in with a key I didn’t know existed, and she had answered my lonely text with a joke about the apartment missing me.

The apartment.

She had been in it.

She had looked around at the home she was systematically robbing and made a warm little joke to its owner about how it longed for her return.

I have thought about the specific mind that can do that — that can stand inside the home of the woman who paid for her divorce lawyer, mid-theft, and type something tender to her in real time.