My Landlord Had a Key and Used It When We Were Out

We rented the ground floor of a house, and from the first month something was off. Small things. A chair not quite where we left it. A cupboard door open we were sure we had closed. My mail opened and resealed clumsily. A faint smell of a cologne neither of us wore, hanging in the living room some evenings when we got home from work.

We told ourselves we were imagining it, or being forgetful, the way you do, until the day my partner came home early with a migraine and heard someone moving around inside our locked flat, and by the time she got the door open, the back door was just clicking shut and no one was there. That was the day we bought a small camera and hid it on a shelf facing the living room.

What we caught over the next two weeks made my skin crawl. Our landlord, who lived upstairs, let himself in with his key twice a week, always during our work hours. He did not fix anything. He did not have a reason. He would come in, walk slowly through the flat, and sit down in our living room, in our chair, for twenty minutes or more, just sitting, sometimes with his eyes closed. He went through the stack of our mail on the table, reading it, opening some of it. He opened our fridge and looked in it. And once, on the recording that ended it for us, he walked into our bedroom, and lay down on our made bed, on top of the covers, on my partner's side, for several minutes, before getting up, smoothing the spread, and letting himself back out.

We did not confront him. We went to the police with the footage, changed nothing about our routine so he would not know, and moved out with the help of an officer present, and a report was filed. A landlord having a key is legal. What he was doing with it was not.

I check now, in every place I rent, exactly who has a key, and I put my own lock on the bedroom door the first day, and I do not care how it looks. A key is trust. He sat in our home and lay in our bed and read our letters, and we never once invited him in.