The letter came in a plain white envelope with no return address, and I knew what it was before I opened it because I had been waiting eleven days for the check that was supposed to be inside it.
I stood on the little concrete stoop of my new apartment across town, the mailbox key still in my hand, and I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, standing there in the cold, because the numbers were not making sense to me. Mr. Vance was not returning my security deposit. Not part of it. Not most of it. All of it. Sixteen hundred dollars, gone, itemized on a single sheet of paper against a list of damages to a duplex I had kept cleaner than the day I moved in.
I want to tell you the whole thing, because for a while I believed the story he wrote about me on that piece of paper. For about an hour, standing in my kitchen with the letter shaking a little in my hand, I actually wondered if I had done something wrong. That is the part that still makes me angry, three years later. Not the money. The way a man like that can make you doubt your own two eyes.
My name is Brenna. I was thirty-one years old that winter, and I had just learned something I want every young renter reading this to know in their bones. Keep your receipts. Photograph every room. Because there are people out there who count on you being too young, too broke, and too tired to fight back.
