My boyfriend, Psycho X, eliminated my five hamsters and bragged about it online. Until I adopted a Chihuahua that bit that itch’s face off. I need to say that upfront because if I try to build up to it slowly, I will lose my nerve. And I have been losing my nerve about this for close to 2 years now. So, here it is.

The night it started or the night I think it started, I was sitting on the floor of my apartment eating Trader Joe’s mandarin chicken straight out of the bag. Not heated up, frozen. I was eating frozen mandarin chicken because I had just gotten home from a double shift at the urgent care clinic where I worked the front desk and I did not have the energy to microwave anything.

My cat Gerald was sitting on the counter watching me with that face cats make when they are deeply concerned about your choices but also could not care less. I should mention Gerald because he matters later even though this is not a cat story. My phone buzzed and it was a text from my boyfriend Kyle and it said, “Hey, so Megan might reach out to you. Just a heads up. Don’t worry about it.

Don’t worry about it. Four words that have never in the history of language actually prevented someone from worrying about it. Kyle and I had been together about five months at that point. We met at a Fourth of July barbecue at his cousin Danyy’s place off Route 9 in Frammingham. I was there because my coworker Priya knew Danyy’s wife.

Kyle was there because he was Danyy’s cousin. He was standing by the cooler wearing a red sock shirt that was slightly too small, holding a sparkler in one hand and a mellow in the other, and he was laughing at something someone said. I remember the laughing because it felt easy, not performed, just easy. We talked for maybe 40 minutes about nothing.

He worked at a warehouse that distributed auto parts. He had a dog when he was a kid named Sergeant. He once drove from Massachusetts to Tennessee because he heard about a barbecue place that only opened on Saturdays. I told him about working at the clinic and about how I was saving up to maybe go back to school for dental hygiene and about how I had just adopted my first hamster, a little golden one I named Biscuit.

He said, “That is the most perfect name for a hamster I have ever heard.” And maybe it was the sparkler light or the two Coronas I had already had or the way he seemed genuinely delighted by the existence of a hamster named Biscuit. But I gave him my number. We started dating properly a week later.

Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory in Burlington, which I know is not exactly fine dining, but he remembered I mentioned I liked their brown bread and he made a reservation. He made a reservation at the Cheesecake Factory. That is effort. Things were good. Things were really good, actually. Then Megan, I should be careful here because I have gone back and forth a hundred times about whether I was fair to Megan from the start and I honestly do not think I was.

Not at first, not before everything happened. Here is what Kyle told me about Megan in the beginning. They dated for about a year and a half. It ended because she wanted things he was not ready for. Moving in together, merging their lives in a way that felt too fast.

He said the breakup was mutual, which is something people say when it absolutely was not mutual. but they want you to stop asking questions. He also said she had been going through a hard time. Her mom had been sick, not like cold and flu sick. Sick sick, the kind that changes a person. Kyle said Megan had been struggling with it and the relationship could not survive all that weight. I felt bad for her. I actually did.

That is the part I want to be honest about. When Kyle first mentioned her, I thought, “Oh, that poor girl.” I pictured someone sad and overwhelmed and maybe a little lost. And I felt that twist of guilt you get when you are happy and someone else connected to your happiness is not. Then she messaged me on Instagram.

It was maybe a week after Kyle’s don’t worry about it text. And the message was polite, almost too polite. It said something like, “Hi, I know this is random, but I just wanted to introduce myself. Kyle and I used to date and I know you two are together now. I just hope he’s treating you well. No hard feelings on my end.

” I showed it to Priya at work the next day and she looked at me over her Duncan iced coffee and said, “Delete it.” “It seems nice though,” I said. Colleen, she said, “No woman messages her ex’s new girlfriend to say no hard feelings unless there are hard feelings. That message is a door. Do not walk through it. I should have listened to Priya. Priya is smarter than me in the ways that actually matter.

” But I did not listen. I replied. I said something like, “Thanks for reaching out. That’s really mature of you. I appreciate it.” and I added a smiley face which in retrospect was probably like waving a red cape. She replied within minutes and then we were talking and she was funny actually.

She made a joke about Kyle leaving his socks inside out in the laundry and I laughed because I had noticed the same thing. She asked me about myself. I told her I worked at an urgent care clinic. She said she was a vette which made sense later but at the time I just thought, “Oh, she seems sweet.

” Looking back, I think she was studying me, learning what I cared about, what I responded to, what my weak spots were. I have no proof of that. Maybe she really was just being friendly at first and something shifted later, but there were little things. She asked about my apartment. She asked if I lived alone. She asked, “Do you have any pets?” With a casualness that now makes my skin itch. I told her about Biscuit.

I told her about Biscuit and she said, “Oh my god, I love hamsters. I used to have two. They’re the sweetest little things.” And I felt this warm, stupid glow of connection. like maybe this was going to be one of those evolved situations where the ex and the new girlfriend actually get along. I have seen enough Tik Toks to know that is a thing some people manage. I thought maybe I could be that person.

I could not be that person. The first sign something was off came about 3 weeks into my little digital friendship with Megan. I came home from work and my apartment door was unlocked. Not open, just unlocked. And I was certain I had locked it because I always lock it. I have a whole routine. Keys lock, jiggle the handle, walk away.

I checked everything inside. Nothing was missing. Gerald was fine, sleeping on the back of the couch like a little furry gargoyle. Biscuit was in her cage, spinning on her wheel. Nothing looked touched or moved. I told Kyle about it and he said it was probably the building maintenance guy that my landlord was weird about sending people in without notice.

And I accepted that because it was easier than the alternative. 2 days later, I came home and Biscuit’s water bottle was empty. I always fill it before I leave. Always. I stood there in my kitchen looking at that dry water bottle and felt something cold move through my chest and I could not explain why. I filled it.

Biscuit drank like she had been thirsty for hours. I sat on the floor next to her cage and watched her and tried to convince myself I had just forgotten that I had been rushing that morning, that it was nothing. Around that time, maybe early September, I adopted my second hamster, a little white one with a brown patch over one eye.

I named her patches because I am not creative with names, but I am consistent. Kyle helped me set up the second cage. He was good like that, patient with the small things. He sat on my floor for an hour, making sure the water bottle was at the right height and that the bedding was deep enough for burrowing. You know, he said, “Megan used to keep hamsters, too. She was obsessed with them for a while.

I remember looking at him and something flickering like a signal trying to come through static, but I did not tune into it. I just said, “Yeah, she mentioned that.” He gave me a look. You two talk a little on Instagram. He went quiet for a second. Not angry quiet, something else. He picked at the edge of the bedding bag and said, “Just be careful with her, okay? She is not always what she seems.

” I wanted to ask what he meant by that, but his phone rang and it was Dany asking about football plans for Sunday. And the moment passed and I let it go. Priya, by the way, had started giving me a look every time I mentioned Megan. This tight closed mouth thing where her lips kind of disappeared.

She never said I told you so out loud, but her face was screaming it. One afternoon in the breakroom, while some episode of the Price is Right was playing on the wall-mounted TV that nobody ever changed the channel on, Priya said, “Have you Googled her?” Googled who? Megan. No. Why would I Google her? Priya unwrapped her granola bar very slowly like she was giving me time to arrive at the answer myself. I did not arrive at the answer.

Because Priya said, “You are exchanging personal information with a stranger whose only qualification is that she used to sleep with your boyfriend. And you don’t even know her last name, do you? I opened my mouth and then closed it. She was right. Megan and I had been messaging for weeks and I did not know her last name. I knew she was a vette. I knew her mom was sick.

I knew she liked hamsters, but I did not know her full name. That should have been the moment. That should have been when I pulled back. Instead, I went home and adopted hamster number three, a tiny gray one I found at PetSmart on Route 1. I named him Dusty. He was skittish and fast, and he bit me twice the first day, and I loved him for it.

Here is where I need to slow down because the next part is hard. It was a Tuesday in October. I know it was a Tuesday because Tuesdays were my early days at the clinic and I got home around 3. I walked in the door and Gerald was sitting in the hallway, which was unusual.

He normally met me at the door with this chirpy little meow, but he was just sitting there stiff staring toward the bedroom. I walked past him and into my room where I kept the cages and patches was de@d. She was lying on her side in the bedding completely still. No marks, no bl00d, nothing visible, just gone. I picked her up and she was cold, which meant she had been de@d for a while.

I held her in my hands and I could feel her tiny bones and the softness of her fur. And I stood there in my bedroom and I did not cry. I just stood there. My brain went somewhere flat and quiet like the sound had been turned off on everything. I buried her in a shoe box in the little patch of garden behind my building. I used a serving spoon because I did not own a shovel. It took forever.

The ground was already getting hard from the early cold and I kept hitting rocks. Kyle came over that night and held me while I cried, which I finally did. Hours later in the dark while we were watching something on Netflix that I cannot remember.

He said hamsters sometimes just d!e, that it happens, that they have weak hearts and short lives and it might have been natural. The vet I took her to the next day before I buried her said the same thing. No obvious cause of de@th, possibly cardiac. Hamsters are fragile. I believed them. I needed to believe them. Two weeks later, Dusty d!ed. Same way on his side, cold, no marks. I came home from work and there he was and the flat quiet came back. But this time, there was something underneath it.

This hum like anger, but not quite anger, something more like the feeling right before you understand something terrible. I called Kyle and I was not calm. I was standing in my kitchen with Dusty and a paper towel in my hand and I said, “Two hamsters in two weeks, Kyle. Two.” He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Colleen, I need to tell you something about Megan.

” And this is the part where I should have sat down, but I did not. I stayed standing in my kitchen with a de@d hamster in my hand. He told me that Megan had not taken the breakup. Well, that Mutual was generous, that she had shown up at his apartment multiple times after they split, that she had created fake social media accounts to monitor what he was doing, that she had once left a de@d bird on the hood of his car, which he told himself was a coincidence, a cat dropping it there or something, but which he knew deep down was not. He told me that the reason Megan knew so much about hamsters, is

that she had worked at a vet clinic for years. She knew animal anatomy. She knew dosages. She knew how to make something look natural. I asked him why he had not told me any of this before. He said he did not want to scare me. He said he thought she had moved on. He said he thought it was over. I think about that a lot.

How Kyle chose to protect me from information instead of protecting me with it. I still do not know which one of those is worse or if there is even a difference. Some days I think he was scared too and fear makes people stupid. Other days I think he was selfish and those days are harder because they make me question everything else. I did not sleep that night.

I sat on the floor next to Biscuit’s cage with Gerald in my lap and I watched her breathe. Just watched the tiny rise and fall of her side and I thought about Megan’s message. Do you have any pets? The smiley face I sent back. The way she said she loved hamsters. The next morning, I changed my locks. I bought a Ring camera for my front door.

I filed a report with the police, which they took politely and did absolutely nothing with. The officer, a young guy who looked like he had graduated from high school about 15 minutes earlier, said there was no evidence of break-in or foul play and that hamster de@ths are common and essentially implied I was being dramatic.

He did not use that word, but I could feel it sitting in the room like a third person. Priya went with me to the station. She sat next to me in those plastic chairs in the waiting area, and she did not say, “I told you so.” She just held my hand. I am going to remember that for the rest of my life. the way she held my hand and did not say a single word.

For a few weeks, nothing happened. November came. The Ring camera showed nothing unusual. No one approached my door. I started to think maybe I was wrong. Maybe Kyle was wrong. Maybe Patches and Dusty just d!ed because hamsters d!e and I was building a conspiracy out of grief. I adopted two more hamsters in December. I know. I know how that sounds.

Priya made exactly that face when I told her. But I had this feeling like if I stopped, if I let the empty cages stay empty, then whoever or whatever took them from me had won. And also, I just loved them. I loved the tiny sounds they made. The way they stuffed their cheeks, the way Biscuit would come to the edge of her cage when I talked to her like she was actually listening.

The new ones were brother and sister from a local rescue. I named them Waffle and Maple. They were golden brown and energetic, and Waffle had this habit of sleeping on his back with his feet in the air that looked so ridiculous it made me laugh every single time. Christmas was nice.

Kyle gave me a necklace with a tiny hamster charm on it, which was either the most thoughtful gift I have ever received or the darkest piece of foreshadowing in my life, depending on how you look at it. I gave him a car heart jacket because he was always cold at the warehouse. We spent Christmas Eve at his mom’s house in Waltham.

She made this incredible brisket and his little sister Jenna kept trying to get me to play Just Dance on the Switch. I liked his family. They were loud and messy and real. His mom, Linda, hugged me at the door when we left and said, “You’re good for him, Colleen. You soften him.” I thought about Megan then. Wondered if Linda had hugged Megan like that. Wondered what Linda knew. January was when the Instagram post started.

Megan had not messaged me since September. I had blocked her after the conversation with Kyle and I thought that was that, but she made new accounts and she started posting. The first one was a photo of a hamster cage. Empty, clean. The caption said something like, “Thinking about the little ones today. Nothing directly threatening.

Nothing you could point to and say that is a threat.” Just a photo of an empty cage. The second was a selfie of her smiling holding a small bottle of something I could not identify. The caption was tools of the trade with a winking emoji. She tagged it with hamster related hashtags.

The third was a close-up of her hands and she was wearing gloves, those thin medical exam gloves, and the caption said, “Clean hands, clean conscience.” Kyle reported the accounts. They came down and new ones appeared within hours. It was like trying to hold water. She was always there, always one step sideways, never quite saying anything explicit enough to be actionable, but saying everything.

My friend from high school, Teresa, called me one night in late January. I had not talked to Teresa in months. She lived in Connecticut now and we mostly communicated through liking each other’s Instagram stories, which is the millennial version of friendship. Colleen, she said, I do not want to freak you out, but this girl is posting about you. Teresa sent me a screenshot from yet another account.

It was a block of text, like a mini essay, and it talked about how some people take things that are not theirs, how some people walk into someone else’s life and steal what they built. It did not name me directly. It did not name Kyle, but it described a girl who worked at a medical clinic and had a cat in hamsters and lived alone in an apartment in my town. It described me so specifically that it could not have been anyone else.

And at the bottom, she had written, “I always take back what’s mine, one piece at a time. I remember I was eating dinner when Teresa called. I was eating a bowl of ramen, the good kind from the place on Main Street. And when I read that post, I put the bowl down and did not eat for the rest of the night or the next morning.

I think I ate a granola bar at work around 2 the next afternoon because Priya physically put one in my hand. February was when it happened, a Thursday, February 9th. I remember because the next day was my mom’s birthday and I had a card sitting on my kitchen counter that I had not mailed yet because I always mailed things late. Every year my mom would call me on her birthday and say, “The card came on the 12th again, Colleen.

” And I would promise to do better and I never did. That is the kind of daughter I am. I love my mom more than anything, and I cannot mail a card on time to save my life. I came home from work and the Ring camera had been knocked off its mount. It was hanging by its wire pointing at the ground.

When I reviewed the footage later, you could see a hand, just a hand in a dark sleeve reaching up and twisting it. I went inside and I knew before I even walked into the bedroom. I knew from the silence. There is a specific quality to the silence when something alive is not alive anymore. It has weight. Biscuit, waffle, maple, all three in their cages. Still cold, gone.

Biscuit, who I had had since before I met Kyle. Biscuit, who was the first thing I took care of that was entirely mine. Biscuit, who used to press her little nose against the bars of her cage when I came home like she was happy to see me. I did not call Kyle. I did not call Priya. I did not call the police.

I sat on my bedroom floor and I held Biscuit in my hands and I talked to her. I told her I was sorry. I told her I should have protected her. I told her she was a good hamster, the best hamster. I sat there until it got dark and the room went gray and then black and Gerald came and sat next to me and even he was quiet.

The next morning, I called the police again. Different officer this time, a woman, older, who actually seemed to care. She took notes. She looked at the ring footage. She asked about Megan. She filed a report. She said she would look into it. They looked into it. They found nothing.

No fingerprints, no DNA, nothing on the ring camera except that hand. Megan lived 40 minutes away and had, according to her roommate, been home all day. The roommate vouched for her. I later found out the roommate was Megan’s cousin, but the police considered the alibi solid. I want to talk about what it feels like to know who did something and to have no one believe you, or not that they don’t believe you exactly, but that the system is not designed for what happened to you.

There is no law specifically about someone sneaking into your apartment and k!lling your hamsters with what you suspect was veterary medication administered in precise enough doses to leave no trace. There is no checkbox for that on a police report. There is animal cruelty, but you have to prove it and I could not prove it.

All I had was de@d hamsters and a gut feeling and a string of Instagram posts that a lawyer would call ambiguous. Kyle wanted to confront her. He wanted to drive to her apartment and have it out. I said no because I was afraid of what she might do next and also because honestly part of me blamed him. He brought her into my life. Not directly, but his past brought her to my door and his silence gave her time. I was not fair about that and I know it.

But fairness was not something I had a lot of in February. We fought a lot. Not screaming fights, worse. The quiet kind where you stop saying what you mean and start saying other things that are beside the point but still hurt. He would ask how I was doing and I would say fine. He would reach for me in bed and I would roll over.

He started staying later at the warehouse and I did not ask why. One night he said, “You know this is not my fault, right?” And I said, “I know, but I said it in a way that meant I did not know.” And he heard it and he got up and put his shoes on and left. And I heard his truck start in the parking lot and pull away. And I stood at the window and watched the tail lights disappear. And I felt relieved.

I felt relieved. And that scared me more than anything Megan had done. My mom called on her birthday. I had not mailed the card. She asked me how I was and I told her about the hamsters and she was quiet for a very long time. And then she said, “Colleen, come home.” I did not go home.

My mom lives in Brockton and going home felt like admitting defeat and I had already lost enough. March. The posts continued. Megan had gotten bolder. She was not even trying to be subtle anymore. She posted a photo of five small mounds of dirt in a row, like tiny graves. The caption was a smiley face. Just a smiley face. I reported it. Instagram took it down.

She reposted it from a new account within the hour. Something in me shifted that month. I do not know how else to describe it except that the fear dried up and what was left underneath was something harder. Not anger exactly. Anger burns. This was colder. This was the feeling of deciding. I went to the animal shelter on a Saturday in mid-March.

I was not looking for a Chihuahua. I was not looking for anything specific. I think part of me just wanted to be around animals again because my apartment was so quiet without the hamsters that it felt like the walls were closing in. The shelter was on Concord Street, a small brick building that always smelled like pine cleaner and kibble.

I walked through the rows of kennels, past pit bulls and lab mixes, and one enormous cat that looked like it wanted to fight me. And then I saw him. He was in the last kennel on the left, a chihuahua, maybe 4 lb, tan and white with ears like satellite dishes.

He was standing at the front of the cage, not barking, not wagging, just staring at me with these enormous dark eyes that looked like they contained multitudes. His name tag said, “Senior bitey,” which the shelter worker, a college-age guy named Trevor, explained was not his real name, but a nickname because, quote, “He bites.” I said, “Like a lot.” Trevor said, “He’s been returned three times. He’s kind of a nightmare, to be honest.

but he’s also 11 years old and he deserves a home and I feel like I’m legally required to tell you that while also selling you on him. I looked at Senior Bitey. Senior Bitey looked at me. He let out one single sharp bark that sounded like a gunshot in the tile corridor. I want him, I said.

Trevor said, “Are you sure? He really does bite. Like genuinely. We have incident reports. I want him.” I renamed him Frank. I do not know why. He just looked like a Frank to me. Gerald was suspicious of Frank immediately, and Frank was suspicious of everything immediately.

And for the first two weeks, my apartment was a tense cold war situation between a cat who believed he was the apex predator of a 600 ft apartment and a 4-PB Chihuahua who believed the same thing. Frank bit me twice the first day. Once on the thumb when I tried to pick him up, and once on the ankle when I walked past his bed. He bit Kyle on the hand when Kyle reached down to pet him, and Kyle said a word I will not repeat and looked at me like I had lost my mind. Why this dog, Colleen? Why the meanest Chihuahua in Massachusetts? I did not have an answer.

Not a rational one. But there was something about Frank. Something about the way he refused to be small. He was 4 lb and he acted like he was 400. He feared nothing. He trusted no one. He had been returned three times and he did not care. He did not learn to be sweet so people would keep him. He just stayed exactly who he was.

I needed that energy in my life. I know that sounds insane, but I was so tired of being the girl who was nice and polite and replied to threatening messages with smiley faces. I was tired of being soft. Frank was not soft. Frank was a tiny vessel of pure, uncut fury, and I loved him. Over the next few weeks, something interesting happened. Frank started to trust me.

Not Kyle, not Priya, not anyone else, just me. He would follow me from room to room, his tiny nails clicking on the hardwood and sit at my feet while I cooked or watched TV or did laundry. He slept at the foot of my bed, and if I moved in the night, his head would pop up, ears rotating like little radar dishes, scanning for threats. He still bit everyone else.

Priya called him the devil’s Chihuahua and refused to come inside my apartment without boots on. Kyle developed a strategy of standing completely still when Frank was nearby, like he was trying not to attract a dinosaur’s attention in Jurassic Park. My neighbor, this sweet old man named Mr.

Petritis, tried to give Frank a treat once in the hallway, and Frank latched onto his thumb so fast the treat went flying. Mr. Petritis was incredibly gracious about it and said his late wife’s peines was the same way. But I still felt terrible. But with me, Frank was different. He would curl up in the crook of my arm and fall asleep, this hard little body going soft, and I would feel his heartbeat against my skin, fast and fierce and alive.

April, I started to feel something like normal again. Kyle and I were still Rocky. We had not really fixed anything. We just sort of stopped fighting and started coexisting, which is not the same thing, but looks similar from the outside. He came over on weekends. We watched Survivor together on Wednesday nights. We did not talk about Megan. Then April 14th.

I will never forget the date because it was the same day Priya texted me that she was pregnant, which was the first piece of genuinely good news I had received in months. and I was sitting on my couch smiling at my phone like an idiot when the doorbell rang. I checked the Ring camera. It was Megan.

She was standing at my door in a green jacket with her hair pulled back and she was holding flowers. Flowers like she was coming to a dinner party like this was normal. I should have not answered the door. I know that every true crime podcast I have ever listened to is screaming at me from the past to not answer that door.

But that cold hard thing inside me, the thing that had been building since February, that thing answered the door. I opened it about 6 in with the chain still on and I said, “What do you want?” She smiled. And here is the thing about Megan that I have to be honest about. She was pretty, like really pretty. Dark hair, green eyes, clear skin. She looked like someone you would trust.

She looked like someone who would help you carry your groceries. Colleen, she said, “I just wanted to come by and say I’m sorry for how things have been. I know the last few months have been weird. I’ve been going through a lot with my mom and I have not been my best self.” Her voice was steady and calm, and I hated how reasonable she sounded.

I hated that if a stranger walked by at that moment, they would see a nice woman bringing flowers to another woman’s door and apologizing. “Your best self,” I repeated. “Your best self k!lled my hamsters.” Something moved across her face. Not guilt, not surprise, something closer to amusement.

It was there for half a second and then it was gone, replaced by this practiced expression of concern. Colleen, I don’t know what Kyle has told you, but I would never hurt an animal. I work with animals. I love animals. I think maybe the stress of everything has made it easy to look for someone to blame, and I understand that. I really do. But I did not. Frank appeared at my ankles. He had been asleep on the couch.

I do not know what woke him up. Maybe the doorbell. Maybe the sound of her voice. Maybe some frequency only he could hear. But he was there, 4 lb of indignation, staring through the 6-in gap in the door at Megan. and his whole body was trembling, not shaking like a nervous chihuahua, trembling like an engine revving. Megan looked down at him and said, “Oh, cute.

You got a Frank went through the gap. I still do not understand the physics of it.” The chain was on. There were 6 in of space. Frank is small, but he is not that small. But he went through that gap like he was liquid, like his bones temporarily stopped existing, and he was on her before she could finish her sentence. She screamed.

The flowers went everywhere. Tulips scattering across the hallway carpet. And Frank was attached to her face, specifically her lower lip. He had her lower lip in his teeth. And he was not letting go. And she was screaming and stumbling backward. And I was standing in my doorway with the chain still on trying to process what was happening. I should have felt horror. I should have felt panic.

I should have immediately grabbed Frank and pulled him off. What I felt was something I am not proud of, but I am going to be honest about. I felt a surge of something bright and fierce and satisfied. And it lasted about 3 seconds before reality kicked in. And I fumbled with the chain and got the door open and grabbed Frank around his middle and pulled.

He held on for another second, those tiny jaws locked like a vice. And then he released and I pulled him to my chest. And Megan was standing in the hallway with bl00d running down her chin and her eyes wide and her hand pressed to her mouth. And she said through her fingers, something I could not make out. Mr. Petritus opened his door across the hall.

He looked at Megan, looked at me holding Frank, looked at the tulips all over the floor and said, “Should I call someone?” “Yes,” I said. The police came, an ambulance came. Megan needed stitches, seven of them, in her lower lip. There was a lot of bl00d, lip wounds bleed a lot, apparently.

She told the paramedics and the police that she had come to apologize to me and my dog had attacked her unprovoked. I told the police she had been harassing me for months and had k!lled my hamsters and that she had come to my door uninvited. I showed them the ring footage. I showed them the Instagram posts I had screenshotted. I showed them the previous police report.

The female officer from before, the one who had actually cared, was not there. The officers who showed up were new to the situation, and they looked at Megan bleeding and me holding a Chihuahua. And I could see them trying to figure out who the victim was. Here is something nobody tells you about these situations. The person who bleeds gets the sympathy.

Even when they are the one who showed up at your door, even when they k!lled your pets, even when you have a folder of evidence on your phone, the person with bl00d on their face is the person everyone wants to help first. Megan pressed charges against me for the dog bite. She said she wanted Frank put down.

When I heard that, something inside me cracked so wide open that I thought I was going to be sick right there in the hallway. I held Frank tighter and he pressed against my chest and I could feel his heartbeat still racing and I thought, “You came into my home and k!lled my hamsters and now you want to take him, too?” And for the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like to be capable of something terrible.

But I did not do anything terrible. I called a lawyer. The lawyer’s name was Denise Walsh, and she worked out of a small office on Moody Street in Waltham that smelled like coffee and paper. She was in her 50s. No nonsense. With reading glasses on a chain around her neck and a way of looking at you that made you feel like lying would be a truly catastrophic decision. I told her everything.

All of it. the hamsters, the messages, the Instagram posts, the door, the visit. Frank, she listened without interrupting, which is a skill I have noticed very few people actually have. When I finished, she took her glasses off, rubbed the bridge of her nose, and said, “How much of this can you prove?” That was the question, was it not? I could prove the Instagram posts. I had screenshots, hundreds of them.

I could prove she came to my door. Ring camera footage. I could prove my hamsters d!ed. vet records, police reports, but I could not prove she k!lled them. I could not prove she entered my apartment. I could not prove connection between her and their de@ths. Denise said, “The dog bite charge is straightforward.

She came to your property. Your dog reacted. Massachusetts law tends to favor the dog owner when someone is on your property uninvited, but it depends on the judge. The harassment case is stronger, but will take time. The animal cruelty honestly is going to be the hardest.” I asked her what I should do. Document everything,” she said.

“Keep documenting and keep that dog. I kept that dog.” The weeks that followed were a blur of legal filings and court dates and stress that settled into my body like concrete. I lost weight, not on purpose. I just stopped being hungry. Priya brought me food at work every day, containers of her mom’s d and rice, and I ate because she stood there and watched me eat, not because I wanted to. Kyle was there. I need to say that through all the legal stuff, Kyle was there.

He drove me to the lawyer’s office. He sat in court with me. He held my hand in the car afterward when I was shaking too hard to put the key in the ignition, but something had broken between us that I did not know how to fix. We were going through a thing together, but we were not going through it as a team.

We were two people standing in the same storm, pointing in different directions. He wanted to move forward. I wanted accountability. He wanted to let the legal system handle it. I wanted Megan to look me in the eye and admit what she did. One night in May, Kyle and I were sitting on my couch and Frank was on my lap and Gerald was on the armrest and Kyle said very quietly, “I think I still feel guilty about Megan.” I looked at him. “Not about you,” he said quickly. “About her, about how things ended.

Her mom was dying, Colleen. She was falling apart and I left.” “You broke up with her? I broke up with someone whose mom was dying because I could not handle it because it was hard and sad and I wanted to be somewhere lighter. And then I met you and you were lighter and it felt good.

And I did not think about what that would look like to someone who was drowning. I sat with that for a long time, longer than he wanted me to, I think. Because what he was saying was that somewhere in the math of all of this, Megan was also a person. A person who had been left during the worst time of her life by someone she loved. That does not excuse anything she did. Not even close. But it explained something.

And I did not want it explained. I wanted her to be a monster because monsters are easy to fight. People are harder. The dog bite case went to a hearing in June. Megan showed up with her lawyer and a scar on her lower lip that was pink and shiny and she sat across the room from me and did not look at me once.

Her lawyer argued that Frank was a dangerous animal with a documented bite history. My lawyer, Denise, argued that Megan had appeared at my residence uninvited after months of documented harassment and that Frank had acted defensively. The judge, a tired-l looking man who seemed like he had seen every possible version of human pettiness, reviewed the evidence.

He looked at the ring footage. He read the police reports. He looked at the Instagram screenshots. He ruled in my favor. He said Frank was not a dangerous animal. He said Megan had been on my property without invitation. He issued a restraining order. And then because Denise is better at her job than anyone I have ever met.

The judge also noted the pattern of harassment and referred Megan’s case to the district attorney for further investigation. The animal cruelty charges were not guaranteed. Denise warned me, but the door was open. In the parking lot after the hearing, I sat in my car for 20 minutes.

The radio was on and it was playing that Chappelle Rowan song, the one that was everywhere that summer. And I just sat there and breathed. Frank was in his carrier on the passenger seat and he was looking at me through the mesh with those huge dark eyes and I reached over and unzipped the top and he climbed out and into my lap and we just sat there in a courthouse parking lot with the windows down and the radio on. I did not feel victorious.

I did not feel vindicated. I felt tired, bone deep, soul level tired, the kind where your body is done processing and just wants to be still. Kyle texted me, “How did it go?” I texted back, “We won.” He sent a thumbs up emoji and then after a minute, I’m proud of you. I stared at that text for a long time.

I wanted it to feel like enough. It didn’t. The investigation into Megan took months. I am going to skip over most of it because it was slow and bureaucratic and involved a lot of waiting and a lot of calls from Denise that started with nothing new yet, but I wanted to check in. During that time, I learned something I had not known.

Megan had been fired from the vet clinic where she worked. Not recently. Before all of this, before Kyle and I even met, she was let go because controlled substances had gone missing from the medication cabinet. And while they could not prove she took them, the discrepancies lined up with her shifts. This is the part where I need to be honest about something uncomfortable. When I found that out, I did not feel validated.

I mean, I did partially, but what I mostly felt was this sickening understanding that the woman who k!lled my hamsters probably did it with medication she stole from a job she lost during a period when her mother was dying and her boyfriend had left her and her life was collapsing in on itself, like a building being demolished floor by floor.

That does not make it okay. Nothing makes it okay. She k!lled five living things that I loved because she wanted to hurt me because she was hurting. And that is a chain of pain that has no good end. I am not going to wrap it up neatly. I am not going to say I forgave her because I have not. I might never. But I can hold two things at the same time.

What she did was evil and she was also a human being in crisis who should have had help and did not. In August, Megan took a plea deal, animal cruelty charges, a misdemeanor, which felt like a gut punch until Denise explained that in Massachusetts what they could prove was limited, and a plea deal meant she admitted guilt.

She got community service and probation and a permanent restraining order, and she was barred from working with animals. I was not in the courtroom when she entered the plea. Denise offered to take me, but I said no. I think I was afraid that if I saw her, I would feel something I did not want to feel. Pity or rage or grief or some terrible cocktail of all three.

That same week, Kyle and I broke up. It was not dramatic. There was no fight, no door slamming, no tearful speeches. We were sitting at his kitchen table eating takeout from that Thai place on Trapo Road, the one with the really good pad cu.

And he said, “I don’t think we’re going to make it, are we?” And I put down my fork and looked at this man who I had liked so much at a Fourth of July barbecue. This man who made a reservation at the Cheesecake Factory because I mentioned I liked the bread. This man who held me while I cried over de@d hamsters and drove me to my lawyer’s office and sat in court. And I said, “No, I don’t think we are.” We sat there for a while after that just eating. Which sounds strange, but it was not.

It was the first honest moment we had shared in months. The food was good. The silence was not painful. It was just the silence of two people who cared about each other, recognizing that caring was not enough. He walked me to my car and he hugged me and it lasted a long time. And when we pulled apart, he had this look on his face like he wanted to say something important.

But what he said was, “Take care of Frank. I will. He’s a good dog. He’s a terrible dog,” I said. And Kyle laughed. And that was the last time I heard him laugh. Not because anything bad happened to him. I just never saw him again after that. We didn’t stay friends. We didn’t check in.

Some people pass through your life like weather. And when the storm clears, they are gone and the sky looks different and you cannot remember what it looked like before. I think about him sometimes when I drive past that cheesecake factory in Burlington. When I see a red sock shirt. When Frank does something unhinged and I picture Kyle standing frozen in the kitchen like a man trying not to attract a predator.

The months after were quiet in a way I had not experienced in over a year. No Instagram messages, no de@d hamsters, no Ring camera footage to review. Just me and Gerald and Frank in our apartment figuring out how to be a weird little family. Gerald eventually accepted Frank. Not warmly, more like a monarch grudgingly acknowledging a neighboring territory.

They developed a system where Gerald got the couch and Frank got the bed and the kitchen was a demilitarized zone. Occasionally I would catch them sleeping within 2 ft of each other and I would take a photo very carefully because if either of them noticed me noticing the truce would end.

I went back to school in September dental hygiene program at a community college in Newton. The commute was rough but the classes were interesting and it felt good to be building something again instead of defending something. Priya had her baby in October, a little girl named Santa. I held her in the hospital and she gripped my finger with her entire hand and I cried, which I told Priya was because of the baby, but was partly because of everything else.

All the loss and the mess and the fear that I had absorbed over the past year, leaked out in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and flowers. And Priya looked at me holding her daughter and she said, “You okay?” And I said, “Yeah, I think I actually am. There is one more thing I need to tell you.” And I have gone back and forth about whether to include it because I am not sure what it means.

About six months after the plea deal, in February of the following year, almost exactly one year after Biscuit and Waffle and Maple d!ed, I got a letter in the mail, no return address, handwritten, it said, “I know you will never forgive me. I’m not asking you to. I just want you to know that I am getting help and I am trying to be different. My mom d!ed in November.

I don’t tell you that for sympathy. I tell you because you should know the whole picture, even the parts that don’t help me. I’m sorry about Biscuit. I’m sorry about all of them. I knew their names. I knew you loved them. That’s what made it work. That’s what makes it unforgivable. She signed it with just the letter M.

I read it once, then I folded it up and put it in the drawer of my nightstand, and I have not opened that drawer since. I do not know if she meant it. I do not know if getting help means she is better or if trying to be different is something she will actually do or just something that sounds good in a letter. I do not know if I will ever read it again.

It lives in that drawer like a small ticking thing. And some days I am aware of it and some days I am not. My mom called me on her birthday this year. The card arrived on time. First time in maybe a decade. She said, “Colleen Marie, did you actually mail this on time?” I did. Are you sick? I am not sick, Mom. Because this is very unlike you and I am concerned.

I laughed and Frank was sitting on my lap and Gerald was on the back of the couch and the apartment was warm and messy and alive. And I looked down at Frank, this awful, perfect four-pound menace who bit a woman’s face because she came to my door.

And he looked up at me with those ridiculous eyes and his one ear was folded inside out, which happened constantly and made him look deranged. And my mom was laughing on the phone and saying she was going to frame the envelope as proof. And outside my window, a car alarm was going off and someone was yelling at it to stop. Frank licked my wrist once, quick and rough, and then bit my thumb. Thank you for watching till the end. Like, share, and subscribe if you’re new.

Until next time.