Everyone in the senior-and-family building off Route 9 in Findlay thinks I am just a lonely old lady who sits by the window and watches the parking lot all day long. They see the gray hair and the orthopedic shoes and they figure my brain went soft somewhere around the Bush administration. That is fine by me. People forget you exist if they think you are harmless, and being forgotten is a very useful way to stay alive in this world.

I am seventy-eight years old, and my knees ache whenever the weather turns damp, but my eyes work just fine. For five months, I have kept a spiral notebook hidden underneath a pile of old afghans inside my ottoman. It sits right next to a cheap burner phone I bought with cash at the Dollar General three miles down the road. Alicia, the young girl who lives across the hall in apartment 214, did not know about the phone until three weeks ago. She only knew about the oatmeal cookies I baked twice a week so she would have a legitimate reason to knock on my door.

Alicia is twenty-four. When she and her boyfriend Devon moved in two years ago, she used to say good morning whenever we passed by the mailboxes. She had a bright little fern on her windowsill and a laugh you could hear right through the thin drywall.

Slowly, over a matter of months, all of that just evaporated. The good mornings stopped. The laugh went completely silent. The fern on her sill turned brown and died because nobody remembered to water it anymore.

Then came the noises through the wall. Muffled thuds that sounded like someone hitting the drywall, followed by a sharp voice that cut off whenever I tapped my cane against the baseboard. Then the sunglasses she started wearing indoors even when the blinds were drawn. Then the way she flinched whenever the mailman slammed the heavy metal cluster box downstairs.

I started writing things down because nobody else was going to do it. Devon left every single day around 3:30 for his afternoon shift at the warehouse, and I was always sitting by my window with a cup of instant coffee. I noted the license plate of his dark blue Charger the very first week, writing it down twice to make sure I did not mess up a single digit.

I logged the exact times he left and the exact times he came back, and I logged the nights the yelling started and the nights it stopped sudden, which was always much worse because quiet meant someone had given up.

When Alicia came out to take out the trash with a thick Ace bandage wrapped tight around her right wrist and told me she had tripped on the stairs, I wrote that down too. Date, time, and her exact words. Three trips in one month. Nobody trips that often unless they are falling away from somebody’s hands.

I did not confront him. You do not confront a man like that when you are seventy-eight years old and your hip clicks if you move too fast, especially not when she is the one who will have to pay the price for it later. I have lived long enough to know that a woman in a house like that has to be the one to walk out the door herself.

All you can do is make sure the door is unlocked and somebody is standing in the hallway holding a flashlight.

One afternoon, Devon slammed his front door and roared out of the parking lot in his Charger, spitting gravel all the way to the highway. I heard Alicia crying through the wall, soft and muffled like she was trying to smother the sound into a pillow. I waited ten minutes, then I walked across the hall and tapped on her door with my knuckle. When she opened it, her sunglasses were sliding down her nose and her lip was swollen purple.

I held out the cheap burner phone I had already charged and programmed with my number and the local sheriff’s direct line.

“You keep this hidden,” I told her, pressing it into her palm before she could pull her hand back. “If it ever gets bad, any hour of the night, you knock on my door. I don’t sleep much anyway.”

She stared down at the little plastic screen and started to tremble all over. “He checks my phone every night,” she whispered, her voice cracking right down the middle. “He looks through every text.”

“That is why you’ve got two now,” I said.

That was three weeks ago. Since then, every time I heard his car pull into the lot, my hand went right to the latch of the ottoman. I rehearsed what I was going to do a hundred times while I sat in my armchair watching the rain come down over Route 9.

Last night at two in the morning, there was a soft scratch at my door. Then a heavier hit, like someone leaning against the wood and sliding down.

I got up faster than these old knees have moved in twenty years, abandoning my blanket right on the carpet. When I unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open, Alicia was crumpled halfway against the wall in a torn t-shirt, clutching her ribs and gasping for air so hard she could not even get the words out.

I grabbed her arm and pulled her inside, slamming the heavy wooden door shut and throwing both locks. I walked her straight to the kitchen chair and sat her down, then I went straight to the ottoman. I lifted the lid, pulled out the five-month spiral notebook with every date and plate number neatly inked in blue ballpoint, and picked up the spare phone.

I looked down at her bruised face and said the exact thing I had been practicing in the quiet dark for half a year.

“Sit down, sweetheart. It’s time. I’m going to make the call now, and I need you to tell them everything I’ve already written down.”

Alicia just looked up at me, her hands shaking as she took the notebook into her lap, and nodded.

Devon thought he was dealing with a lonely old bat who spent her afternoons watching cars. He should have known that old bats never sleep, and they never forget a license plate. By sunrise, the deputies had him cuffed in the parking lot, and Alicia was packed into the back of a silver sedan heading three states away to her sister’s place where she wouldn’t have to look at Route 9 ever again.