The flight from Kuwait to Colorado Springs routed through Ramstein and then Dallas: 26 hours. I slept in pieces. The recycled air tasted like aluminum and someone else's breakfast.
I landed at Colorado Springs Airport on a Thursday in November. Grabbed my duffel from the belt, walked outside. The Pikes Peak skyline hit me like a photograph I had been staring at in my head for nine months, and now somebody had put it back in focus.
I took a cab—$14 ride. The driver asked if I was coming home from deployment. I said, "Yes." He said, "Welcome home." I said, "Thank you." Neither of us said anything else. That was fine.
The cab turned onto Pinecrest Ridge Drive at 2:07 p.m. The townhomes looked the same: neat, symmetrical, little flags of frost on the lawns from the early cold snap. My unit, 14C, sat at the end of the row: patio facing the mountains, front door painted the same dark green I remembered.
I paid the driver, walked up my steps, put the key in. It didn't turn.
I pulled it out, checked it: same key, same ring, same cut I'd had made at the hardware store on Academy Boulevard three years ago. I tried again. Nothing. The lock cylinder didn't even engage.
Then I looked closer. The deadbolt was brass—polished, bright brass. I had installed a brushed nickel Schlage B60N.
This was not my lock. Someone had changed my deadbolt while I was eating MREs in the Kuwaiti desert.
I walked around to the back. The sliding door had a new latch on it: a cheap pin lock drilled into the frame. Also not mine.
I pressed my face against the living room window. My couch, my coffee table, my bookshelf—but the throw pillows were different. And a pink rolling suitcase sat upright near the armrest, like a guest who'd made herself comfortable.
Somebody was living in my house.
I called Nate. He came out his front door in 90 seconds, coffee still in hand, wearing a flannel and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He looked at my face and set the coffee down.
"Something's wrong," he said—not a question.
"My locks are changed, Nate. There's a suitcase in my living room."