The smell of amber perfume always lingers in the corners of my memory whenever I think back to the way things used to be before Gary moved into my place. It was not my scent. I buy the plain lavender soap from the pharmacy because anything else gives me a headache.

I pushed open my front door at seven in the morning, my gym bag heavy on my shoulder, and the air in the front hall felt wrong. It was thick.

It smelled like high-end department store cosmetics instead of the floor wax I used on Sunday.

I dropped my keys on the oak table and walked toward the kitchen to put the kettle on before the house woke up. My favorite silk robe, the dark emerald one I bought myself after the first trust disbursement cleared, was missing from the hook by the pantry.

A blonde woman was standing by my stove, stirring coffee with my silver spoon. She was wearing my emerald robe. She didn’t even look startled when I stepped into the doorway. She just turned around, leaned her hip against the counter, and took a slow sip from my favorite ceramic mug.

I stood there because my brain kind of stopped working for a second. “Who are you?”

She smiled like we were old college roommates meeting up for brunch. “I’m Chloe. Gary’s new housekeeper.”

Before I could process the word housekeeper in a three-bedroom house where nobody irons sheets, heavy footsteps hit the stairs.

Gary came walking down the hallway. He was wearing my second robe, the burgundy one with the frayed belt that I kept on the back of the bathroom door.

He didn’t look guilty. He looked annoyed, the way he always looked when I interrupted his sleep before nine o’clock.

“Babe,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and blinking against the morning light. “You’re back early.”

I looked from the robe on his shoulders to the blonde woman standing in my kitchen using my good silverware. “Gary. What is going on here?”

He cleared his throat and tried that little half-smile he used whenever he forgot to pay the electric bill on time. “She’s my niece, honey. Chloe needed a place to land for a few weeks, and since she’s so good around the house, she’s helping out.”

Then his phone buzzed on the kitchen island. The screen lit up against the granite. It was a picture message from an unknown number.

I looked down. It was Gary and Chloe. In my bed. Tangled in the white cotton sheets I bought in Charleston.

My whole world broke right then, but the weird part was how quiet everything got inside my head. The panic just vanished, replaced by something cold and heavy that settled right behind my ribs.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t throw my gym bag at him. I just reached out, picked up my coffee mug from the counter, and took a slow sip while I looked him dead in the eye.

“Gary,” I said, my voice sounding entirely too calm even to my own ears. “This house is mine. Paid with my five million dollar trust fund.”

He stopped mid-sentence, his jaw going slack. “You never told me!”

I set the mug down so hard the ceramic chipped against the stone. “And you never told me about her.”

Gary tried to step forward, his hands raised in that placating way he had whenever he knew he was caught dead to rights. “Now hold on, let’s just talk about this like adults, we can figure something out, don’t be hasty.”

I didn’t answer him. I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed the local sheriff’s department.

I gave the dispatcher my address, told them I had two unauthorized squatters refusing to leave my property, and asked for a car immediately.

Chloe finally lost that smug little smile. She dropped my silver spoon on the floor, the metal clattering loudly against the tile. “You can’t just throw us out on the street like this.”

“Watch me,” I said.

Two deputies arrived fifteen minutes later. They didn’t even need to look at the paperwork twice. I handed them the deed bearing my maiden name and the bank routing statements showing the property was purchased outright five years before Gary ever packed a single cardboard box into my hallway.

Gary screamed at the top of his lungs while the officers gently but firmly guided him toward the front door. Chloe stood by the kitchen island crying real tears into my emerald silk sleeve while they packed her cheap plastic bins with whatever they could grab in three minutes.

I stood on the front porch with my arms crossed over my chest and watched them throw everything onto the front lawn. The neighbors were already peeking through their sheer curtains across the street, but I didn’t care who was watching.

Gary kept shouting about fairness and the years he invested into the relationship as the patrol car backed down the drive. I just watched the taillights turn the corner by the mailbox and went back inside to lock the deadbolt.

Two days later, the fallout hit just like I knew it would.

Gary called from a burner phone, his voice shaking with a pathetic kind of panic, begging me to let him come back for his golf clubs and his vintage receiver. I told him his golf clubs were sitting in the wet grass by the municipal curb and hung up the phone.

Chloe didn’t even last forty-eight hours with a man whose entire financial strategy relied on mooching off a homeowner with a trust fund. The local gossip mill moves fast in a town this size, and by Thursday morning, I heard through the cashier at the hardware store that Chloe had already packed her plastic bins into the back of a pickup truck belonging to the bartender down at the local tavern.

Gary had nowhere to go. He didn’t have enough saved for a deposit on a studio apartment, and none of his old buddies wanted a freeloader crashing on their couch for free.

The following Monday, Gary found himself standing in line at the Greyhound station with a single duffel bag slung over his shoulder, buying a one-way ticket to Oklahoma to move back in with an uncle he hadn’t spoken to since Thanksgiving of 2014.

Meanwhile, Chloe thought she had upgraded when she moved into the bartender’s small rental house down by the rail yards. She figured she was trading up for a man with a steady job and a lease in his own name.

She found out the hard way that the bartender’s lease was actually in his mother’s name, and the mother didn’t take kindly to strangers moving in and wearing silk robes around the breakfast table.

Two weeks after the eviction, I walked down to the post office to pick up my mail, and a local acquaintance mentioned she saw Chloe hauling her plastic bins right back out to the curb in front of the tavern.

Karma said welcome home. I unlocked my front door, stepped into the quiet hallway, and breathed in the clean scent of floor wax and lavender soap.