The Woman Who Warned Me About My Own Front Door

She stopped me on an ordinary high street on an ordinary afternoon — an older woman, unremarkable, slightly out of breath as though she'd hurried to catch me. She said my name, which was the first wrong note; I didn't know her. Then, before I could do more than frown, she described my front door.

Precisely. The colour, the specific brass number that hangs slightly crooked, the crack in the second panel, the wind chime my daughter made that I keep meaning to take down. My own front door, a mile away, described by a stranger who then looked at me with a kind of urgent apology and said: 'Don't open it tonight. Not for the man who knows your dog's name. Whatever he says. Don't open the door.'

And then she was gone — into the crowd, around a corner, at a pace that suggested she very much did not want to be asked questions, and I stood there holding my shopping with my heart doing something complicated, telling myself it was a scam, a trick, a piece of elaborate street theatre, and failing to believe myself, because she'd described the wind chime.

I went home rattled. I have a dog, a friendly spaniel, whose name is not a common one and is not on any tag she wears and is not, as far as I could think, discoverable by a stranger. I told myself I was being ridiculous. I made dinner. I did not fully relax.

At about half past nine, someone knocked at my front door. And through it, a man's voice, pleasant, reasonable, said my dog's name. 'Come on, let her out, we haven't got long,' the voice said, warmly, using my dog's name like an old friend, like someone who belonged, like someone I should obviously open the door for.

I did not open the door. I stood in my hallway with my hand over my own mouth and my dog growling low at the letterbox, and I did not open the door, and after a while — a long while, during which the voice tried a few more times, patient, familiar, wrong — the knocking stopped, and I heard, or thought I heard, footsteps go back down the path, and then nothing.

I never found out who he was, or how he knew my dog's name, or what would have happened if I'd opened the door to a stranger who spoke to me like a friend. And I never saw the woman again, though I've looked for her on that high street a hundred times since, wanting to thank her, wanting to ask how she knew my door, my dog, my night. She knew all of it. She caught me in the street to tell me. And I have kept the wind chime up ever since, out of a superstition I can't name, as if it's a signal she might read, as if she might come back the next time there's a door I shouldn't open.